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Monday, January 23, 2006

iPhrase - Unlock the value of your information

www.iphrase.com IBM has acquired iPhrase Technologies to accelerate its ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time, a key element of achieving Information on Demand. Business accelerates when customers, partners, and employees can quickly and precisely find the information needed -- no more, no less -- shrinking the gap between information need and business action. With this acquisition, IBM is establishing a new level of customer value for discovering and delivering actionable information.

iPhrase understands that the fast track to online profitability lies in your ability to provide your customer with the right experiences at the right time.

You need an online solution that adapts to your users’ requests and behavior and delivers exceptional experiences.

iPhrase — the only provider of “adaptive search” — offers a suite of solutions that deliver the online experiences your customers want and the real business results you need.

The award-winning OneStep Platform and Solution Suite allows users to efficiently make purchases, find answers, and solve problems without expert assistance. This powerful combination offers your business measurable results within weeks — not months:

* Accelerate ROI with solutions that grow revenue and reduce costs by increasing conversion, improving loyalty, reducing both calls and email, and speeding resolution time.
* Optimize the user experience by successfully guiding people to the most relevant information with unique insight into the intent of user requests, based on a true understanding of their expressed needs and prior behavior.
* Extend current investments in CRM, Enterprise Portals, and Content Management with the plug-and-play OneStep Platform that provides immediate access to information in these applications without expensive programming and data migration efforts.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Good - Enterprise Wireless Messaging and Application Access

www.good.com Good Technology is the leader in wireless handheld computing software and service, using industry standards to provide the corporate applications enterprises need on the handhelds they choose over the networks they prefer. The company’s GoodAccess and GoodLink products extend mission-critical enterprise applications—including Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, salesforce.com and Siebel—to mobile employees when and where they need them.

Catering to the mobile professional, the Good System includes messaging and corporate data access, as well as a full suite of management features and functions. We offer customers unsurpassed flexibility by allowing them to choose their wireless carrier(s), platform(s), network(s), and device(s). Specifically, we support Palm, Pocket PC, and Symbian (in 2006) operating systems, the latest handheld devices and smartphones that run them, and nearly every wireless carrier, all over the world. Plus, our integration with third-party applications lets our customers view, edit, and interact with documents and attachments, providing the most complete laptop-like experience.

GoodLink is a wireless messaging and application access system that gives mobile field forces a synchronized connection to Microsoft Exchange Server and other critical applications. It not only offers low total cost of ownership; it provides software, service, support, powerful fleet management capabilities, and state-of-the-art security—including VeriSign triple-DES end-to-end encryption of all e-mail, data, and attachments.

Good Technology has partnered with industry leaders such as Microsoft, palmOne, PalmSource, VeriSign, and others. Our partnership with PalmSource and palmOne offers the combination of GoodLink with Palm OS on the Treo 650 and 600—a wireless offering that BusinessWeek described as "like having your desktop in a handheld." This combination was recently rated as the Best Product of 2003 by PC Magazine.

Microsoft and Good Technology broaden the range of devices further with support for Microsoft Windows Mobile for Pocket PC smart phones. Chris Hill, lead product manager of the Mobile Devices Division at Microsoft Corp., says, "GoodLink also enables the ability to view native, rich attachments on Pocket PCs, including Pocket Word and Excel files, making it a natural fit for Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs."

The Good System extends the power of the laptop to the smartphone.

* GoodLink is compatible with the two leading mobile platforms: the Microsoft Mobile platform and Palm OS
* Supported devices include the Pocket PC Phone Edition, and the Treo 650 and 600
* Good Technology partners with leading wireless carriers, including Bell Mobility, Cingular, Orange, Rogers, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon
* The Good Business Partner Program gives customers the power to choose the best channel for their purchase of software and service
* The Good Alliance Partner Program offers an online portal to applications that deliver a laptop-like experience on Good Technology-powered devices

Thousands of enterprise customers have selected GoodLink as their wireless messaging standard, including Aventis-Behring, UnumProvident, CB/Richard Ellis, Liz Claiborne, Visa, Dell, Texas Instruments, and EDS. GoodLink empowers their mobile professionals to communicate more efficiently with customers, suppliers, and partners whenever they’re away from their desks.

Contivo - Driving Automated Integration Today

www.contivo.com Contivo delivers semantic integration solutions enabling companies to take control of integration and Web services projects, including SOA:

* Save over 60% on initial data integration efforts
* Save over 70% of ongoing maintenance costs
* Reduce risk of project delays
* Platform and middleware independence

Nearly Half of IT Activities and Costs Relate to Integration

Application integration is a key element of the evolution of business applications and business processes within and across enterprises. Implementation of every new application or a business process requires integration with data sources across other applications and databases. The complexity of integration varies but it continues to be one of the largest expenditures for IT organizations globally.

Integration covers a range of activities, but every integration project must map and transform data. The single biggest cost in any integration project is the time and resources spent preparing and testing data transformations between source and target systems. It is a laborious process that is prone to errors, and is repeated every time any application or business process is introduced or updated.

Creating data transformations that really work is so hard because it's difficult to understand data and its semantics. This becomes more complex as each application has its own interpretation of the semantics.
The Contivo Advantage

Contivo addresses this problem with patented technologies for semantic data integration that enable automated discovery, mapping, modeling, code generation, and simulation of the data transformation, eliminating the heavy manual work from the data integration process.

The Contivo Vocabulary Management Solution (VMS) consists of a centralized semantic repository that captures, understands, and leverages the structure of application data and tools for designing, developing and deploying cross-platform transformation. Contivo VMS also includes code generators and system simulators that dramatically increase quality and speed deployment. Unlike other vendors, Contivo avoids platform lock-in and eases the transition to web services.

In a nutshell, that's Contivo - saving customers more than half their integration budget. Built by a team with extensive experience in integration and XML, with funding from BEA, Tibco, webMethods and leading Silicon Valley VC's, Contivo aims to continue helping global organizations to get a strong control on their integration projects.

Cogency Software - Access, Understand, Profit - Enhancing Fund Performance

www.cogencysoft.com Cogency has developed core data integration technology that enables our customers to quickly aggregate data from various internal and external data sources to provide optimal decision making capabilities. Our solutions leverage existing data across multiple silos and convert the data into the timely and accurate business insights that drive your business.

Our industry-leading capabilities are founded on a comprehensive platform called Cogency Wisdom. This robust technology aggregates all your data, provides deep portfolio analysis according to any criteria, and is as easy to use as an Excel spreadsheet. Tap real-time data from throughout your firm. View it instantaneously according to your needs and priorities. Quite simply, Cogency Wisdom provides the most powerful, easiest to use information management capability available in the industry.

* Easy integration with your existing technologies and applications through its open environment.
* Intelligence that frees you to quickly seize moneymaking opportunities.
* Access to your information regardless of location or format.
* Flexibility to view information according to your needs - summary views, drill-downs, on-the-fly reports, etc.
* Scalability to grow as your firm's needs expand.

Vendavo - Turn Pricing Insight Into Profits

www.vendavo.com With unmatched success among the most demanding industry leaders in chemicals, manufacturing, high technology, and distribution, Vendavo is the price management solution of choice for complex, global corporations.

When costs have been squeezed out of the supply chain, operations have been streamlined, and most processes have been automated, companies have exhausted their traditional avenues to improve earnings. There is one area of opportunity, however, that is proven, practical, yet still largely untapped. Price management remains as a high-potential approach for companies to identify and capture new margin opportunities.

Based on only small changes to pricing and pricing policies, price management solutions not only enable companies to no longer “leave money on the table,” but in fact offer them significant improvement in bottom-line growth—adding 1 to 3 points to return on sales.

Price management consists of three distinct capabilities applied to a company’s pricing processes:

* Insight a way for executives and managers to see and understand every
component that drives pricing performance
* Guidance a way to offer consistent direction, and the proper amount of control,
to prices and policies across the entire business
* Empowerment a way to put in the hands of every user the power to negotiate every aspect of a deal, including price, volume, and terms, for greater profitability

Price management solutions can generate an impressive return on investment through the production of real business benefits. Vendavo has proven the value of price management with industry leaders in chemicals, industrial manufacturing, high technology and distribution, and we invite you to explore the potential of price management with us.

BigFix - Security Configuration Management

www.bigfix.com Real-time Visibility and Control for Security Configuration Management

Founded in 1997, BigFix is a global company that provides comprehensive and innovative security configuration management solutions. Today, BigFix solutions are proven in production at more than 350 companies, government agencies and public sector institutions worldwide, and on hundreds of thousands of PC clients, workstations, and servers managing millions of changes across distributed IT infrastructures and networks. BigFix customers range from medium-sized enterprises to global companies in a range of industries, including insurance, healthcare,
energy, communications and more.

The BigFix solution is the only scalable and extensible solution that delivers real-time visibility, performance and control, enabling IT to discover, analyze, change and maintain security and software configurations faster and more accurately. With the BigFix Enterprise Suite, customers can control a wide range of configuration management functions from a single platform, leading to improved IT processes, better security, more reliable services and reduced IT management costs.

The company is the recipient of numerous awards and industry recognitions, including the 2005 Codie Award for Best Security Product and the SC Magazine Product of the Year Award. BigFix provides sales and support directly and with partners throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Japan and Australia.

InfoVisat - Service-Centric Performance Management

www.infovista.com To global providers and business users of IT, InfoVista is the Service-Centric Performance Management Software Company that assures the optimal delivery of business-critical IT services.

Driven by a uniquely adaptive and real-time technology foundation, InfoVista solutions:

* Reduce Operating Risk - Pre-empt business technology performance problems and mitigate business risks
* Improve Business Effectiveness - Maximize the availability of technology that supports key business functions
* Lower TCO - Identify opportunities for rightsizing, consolidation and operational efficiencies
* Enhance Business Value - Align Information Technology investments with business priorities and accelerate time to value
* Create Competitive Advantage - Differentiate business operations by maximizing strategic value of business technology

Eighty percent of the world’s largest service providers as ranked by Fortune, as well as leading Global 2000 enterprises, rely on InfoVista to enhance the business value of their technology assets.

GoodMailSystems - Bringing Safety and Reliability to Email

www.goodmailsystems.com Goodmail provides a new class of e-mail that identifies good mail and helps to shield consumers from spam, fraud and phishing. Every message sent through the Goodmail CertifiedEmail service is embedded with a cryptographically-secure token. Goodmail tokens are detected by participating ISPs so the messages can be delivered to recipients' inboxes--not junk or bulk folders. The messages are identified with the CertifiedEmail symbol--a mark that indicates the message is from a trusted sender and can be opened with greater confidence. Goodmail's CertifiedEmail service improves the consumer email experience, addresses the needs of legitimate senders, and enables mailbox providers with a platform that uses state of the art security measures. This premium delivery service is available to qualified businesses that rely on email to reach their customers.

The CertifiedEmail service is easily and efficiently implemented in partnership with participating ISPs and mailbox providers. The service will be launched in the coming months with AOL and Yahoo!, leading global email service providers who process approximately 50% of the mail reaching the inboxes of U.S. consumers.

Market Tools - Real Insights. In Real Time. For Real Value

www.markettools.com By combining deep industry experience, proprietary research technology and proven approaches, MarketTools delivers marketing research unparalleled in its accuracy, speed and value. MarketTools gets you the insights you need, when you need them so you can make the right decision. On Demand.

Digital Harbor - The Composite Applications Company

www.digitalharbor.com Can your users Connect the Dots? Digital Harbor's PiiE Platform (Professional Interactive Information Environment) helps enterprises easily build composite applications and make intelligent decisions by seamlessly linking real-time information from many systems in a single, contextual application.

Friday, January 13, 2006

NetIQ - Knowledge-Based Services Assurance

www.netiq.com NetIQ's Knowledge-Based Service Assurance helps you to know that your enterprise is secure, available and performing. NetIQ counts more than 3,000 of the world's leading enterprises as key customers. In addition, our partnerships with industry leaders, such as Microsoft, IBM, HP and Dell, give NetIQ a unique advantage in the global marketplace.

NetIQ is a leading provider of integrated systems and security management solutions that empower IT organizations with the knowledge and ability necessary to assure IT service. NetIQ's Knowledge-Based Service Assurance products and solutions include embedded knowledge and tools to implement industry best practices and to better ensure operational integrity, manage service levels and risk, and ensure policy compliance. NetIQ's modular, best-of-breed solutions for Performance & Availability Management, Security Management, Configuration & Vulnerability Management, and Operational Change Control integrate through an open, service-oriented architecture allowing for common reporting, analytics and dashboards.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Opsware - Simplify IT - Automate

www.opsware.com Provision and configure 75 Linux servers from bare metal in 2 weeks. Improve network availability from 98% to 99.9%. Identify and patch 1800 Unix servers in 2 hours. Audit configurations on 6000 network devices in 90 minutes. Update ACLs for 300 network devices in 5 minutes. Respond to security certification audit in 98% less time. Reallocate 120 Unix servers in 3 hours. Validate security settings on 100 servers in 2 mins. Update ACLs for 300 network devices in 5 minutes. Deply emergency patch to 450 Windows serers in 90 minutes.

The Opsware Automation Suite is used by IT organizations to automate management of all aspects of their environment including servers, applications, network devices, and asset management.

Opsware provides the only automation software on the market to bring together management of business services, UNIX, Linux, and Windows servers, software, applications, network devices, and asset tracking.

Opsware customers have realized the benefits of automation such as time savings, standardization, and global visibility in a matter of weeks to months.

Opsware's comprehensive out-of-the-box capabilities automate the full lifecycle of managing servers, software, applications, and network devices.

Opsware's extensive integration capabilities enables integration with existing IT systems to significantly reduce downtime and improve TTR. Opsware Automation is deployed in over 250 IT organizations today.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Tacit - Connect the Dots to make the Right Collaboration Happen

www.tacit.com Large, complex, and geographically dispersed organizations by their nature routinely experience internal disconnects, leading to redundant efforts, costly mistakes, re-work, project delays, and poor decisions. While the problem of disconnectedness is not always visible, its consequences are profound. For commercial organizations, routine disconnects can cost millions of dollars and thousands of hours on an annualized basis.

By providing a systematic way to precisely link the right people together within a specific business process, Tacit makes the right collaboration happen. Unlike existing collaboration tools that solely address the "how" part of collaboration, Tacit dynamically identifies the "who," "when," and "why" pieces of collaboration based on a real-time view of organizational activity. As a result, Tacit helps organizations achieve a new level of efficiency, productivity, and responsiveness.

Although the problem of disconnectedness is pervasive in large organizations, attacking this problem will require a focused effort that addresses one business process at a time. Tacit has identified several areas where costly disconnects often occur.

Matisse Networks - Connectionless packet architecture

www.matissenetworks.com Metro networks are today constructed using one of three optical technologies:

* Layer 2/3 Packet Switching over Dark Fiber
* Packet over SONET/SDH
* Packet over DWDM

All of these options are circuit-based technologies requiring the dedication of reserved bandwidth for every specific site-to-site connection - a costly and inefficient use of bandwidth.

Enter Matisse

Matisse’s unique Packet Lambda-Switching technology delivers a connectionless packet architecture where wavelengths are dynamically switched to different destinations. This fundamental rethinking of the architecture yields numerous benefits, including:
* Simplicity Collapses the hierarchy of circuit and switching technologies, and obsoletes the need for circuit provisioning
* Efficiency Unlike circuit networks, bandwidth is available when and where needed
* Reliability Superior fault tolerance is delivered with intelligent packet routing around network failures

Matisse's innovative Packet Lambda-Switching technology is a connectionless packet architecture that dynamically switches optical wavelengths to different destinations on a packet-by-packet basis.

Intelleflex - The Next Generation of RFID

www.intelleflex.com Intelleflex is a Silicon Valley company focused on the next-generation of RFID systems. Intelleflex will bring to market high-performance, high-reliability, EPCTM -compliant transponders and readers. EPC is an interoperable, global standard, initially developed by the MIT AutoID Center and currently being commercialized by EPCGlobal. EPCGlobal is developing specifications, protocols and best practices for worldwide RFID adoption. Intelleflex tags will have the capability of interoperating with all EPC-compliant readers, and are targeted to provide the longest read range and the highest read/write reliability available in the industry. In addition, Intelleflex products offer value-added features such as application-specific security, long battery life, and the capability to add sensors.

Alfresco - Open Source Content Management

www.alfresco.org Alfresco is an open source, open-standards content repository built by the most experienced content management team that includes the co-founder of Documentum.

Alfresco was designed to solve the most pervasive and difficult problems in content management. Alfresco is perfect for developing enterprise and departmental portals, compliance applications or replacing uncontrolled shared file drives. Alfresco's architecture is modular and standards-based allowing you to use only the functionality you want or add new functionality as requirements grow with standard tools. Alfresco's modularity and execution paths offer greater performance and scalability.

Dot Net Nuke - Web Application Framework

www.dotnetnuke.com Welcome to the Official Community and Development Site for the DotNetNuke Open Source Project. From Downloads to Documentation, DotNetNuke.com Offers a Comprehensive Base of Information, Resources, and Support to the DotNetNuke Community.

DotNetNuke Is…

Versatile – DotNetNuke is a Web Application Framework ideal for creating and deploying projects such as commercial web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, and custom vertical applications.

User-Friendly – DotNetNuke is designed to make it easy for users to manage all aspects of their projects. Site wizards, help icons, and a well-researched user interface allow universal ease-of-operation.

Powerful – DotNetNuke can support multiple portals or sites off of one install. In dividing administrative options between host level and individual portal level, DotNetNuke allows administrators to manage any number of sites – each with their own look and identity – all off one hosting account.

Feature-Rich – DotNetNuke comes loaded with a set of built-in tools that provide powerful pieces of functionality. Site hosting, design, content, security, and membership options are easily managed and customized through these tools.

Supported - DotNetNuke is supported by its Core Team of developers and a dedicated international community. Through user groups, online forums, resource portals and a network of companies who specialize in DNN, support is always close at hand.

Easily Installed – DotNetNuke can be up-and-running within minutes. One must simply download the software from DotNetNuke.com, and follow the installation instructions.

Localized – DotNetNuke includes a multi-language localization feature which allows administrators to easily translate their projects and portals into any language.

Open Source – DotNetNuke is provided free, as open-source software, and licensed under a standard BSD agreement. It allows individuals to do whatever they wish with the application framework, both commercially and non-commercially, with the simple requirement of giving credit back to the DotNetNuke project community.

Extensible – DotNetNuke is able to create the most complex content management systems entirely with its built-in features, yet also allows administrators to work effectively with add-ons, third party assemblies, and custom tools. Site customization and functionality are limitless.

Recognized – DotNetNuke is a trademarked name, and a brand widely recognized and respected in the open source community. With over 225,000 registered users and a talented team of developers, DotNetNuke continues to evolve its software through participation, real world trial, and end-user feedback.


DotNetNuke is built on a Microsoft ASP.NET (VB.NET) platform. The most recently released versions are 3.2 and 4.0.

Varicent - Sales Performance Management

www.varicent.com Varicent Software was founded in 2003, in response to a growing demand for Variable-Based Payment and Business Performance Management solutions within large organizations. Having spent many years in the Business Intelligence (BI) and Financial Analytics arena, Varicent’s founders recognized a dramatic organizational shift away from conventional spreadsheet dependence in the areas of financial calculations, business analytics, modeling and reporting. Indeed, with the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in 2002, and the vociferous demands of investors and financial institutions to properly regulate financial reporting, internal controls and management processes, error-prone and cumbersome spreadsheets could no longer be relied upon. Companies were mandated to replace spreadsheet-based financial models with more reliable technologies and applications.

In response to this trend, Varicent launched its first version of its flagship product to enable organizations to abandon conventional spreadsheets for calculating commissions, bonuses and variable-based pay, and instead use Varicent Software to manage these complex functions.

Today, Varicent Software is a leading provider of Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions. Varicent’s flagship product, Varicent SPM, enables organizations across multiple industries to effectively design and mange their incentive pay calculations. Varicent SPM is a web-based solution built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, and its patented rules-based calculation engine can manage the most complex compensation plans. With clients ranging in size, transactional volume and industry, Varicent continues to enhance its product suite to meet the changing demands of its customers.

Ingres - Business Open Source

www.ingres.com Remember Ingres (if you don't you shouldn't be reading this blog). Well, it's gone open source, and this can only be a good thing.

Key Features

* Scalable Server Architecture
With Ingres, systems can grow to meet user demands without rewrites or modification. The same application will run smoothly on a single-processor desktop system or multiprocessor enterprise servers.

* Intelligent Optimizer
Ingres delivers optimum performance by generating query execution plans based on the statistical characteristics of the data.

* Flexible Backup and Recovery
Data integrity is ensured with transaction journaling and the ability to back up data online or offline. Recovery can be to a chosen point in time for all transactions in the defined recovery period or for a more confined subset of transaction activity.

* Choice of Development Options
Since Ingres supports JDBC, ODBC, and .NET remote data connectivity, you can use a wide range of development tools to build applications that leverage Ingres and protect your investment in your staff’s existing skills.

* Ease-of-Management
Ingres is designed to require the minimum amount of maintenance and maximum availability. Less maintenance means fewer DBA’s.

* Flexible Architecture
No two organizations have the same IT infrastructure. Flexibility is the key to being able to support a given architecture and Ingres provides a number of options to achieve this.

* Choice of Distributed Processing Options
Where distributed processing is required, the Ingres Distributed Option allows multiple databases to appear as one virtual database. Alternatively, you can use the Ingres Replicator Option to push data out to other databases, keeping all data synchronized.

* Parallel Query
To fully exploit the capabilities of the latest enterprise-class servers, Ingres now processes queries in parallel across all available CPU resources, dramatically increasing the performance of the queries.

* Key Range Table Partitioning
To help ensure that you get the performance you expect from your hardware, Ingres employs new parallelization techniques. Key range table partitioning allows data to be partitioned across disks based on the value of a given key. As a result, performance can be significantly improved by performing I/O operations across all partitions in parallel.

* Active Cluster Support
Ingres has provided support for active clusters in an OpenVMS environment for many years. This functionality has been extended to include Linux distributions capable of supporting clusters. It allows a system’s workload to be spread across the nodes of a cluster. If one node fails, the remaining ones continue processing to avoid loss of service. Ingres exploits this capability and automatically balances the load across the various nodes in the cluster.

* High-Availability Cluster Support
This is a new capability that is available on Windows, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX platforms. High-availability clusters offer failover support in the event of a node going down. Should Ingres fail on a node, it will be automatically restarted. Should the node running Ingres fail, the database will be started on an alternative node in the cluster.

Pentaho - Open Source Business Intelligence

www.pentaho.org The Pentaho BI Project provides enterprise-class reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities that help organizations operate more efficiently and effectively. The software offers flexible deployment options that enable use as embeddable components, customized BI application solutions, and as a complete out-of-the-box, integrated BI platform.

"An exciting development... the Pentaho BI Project is not only impressive in the depth of capabilities it covers, it also breaks new ground in linking business process management with performance management – effectively closing the loop between key business metrics and the business processes that drive them." Ventana Research

The Pentaho BI Project is an ongoing initiative by the Open Source community to provide organizations with best-in-class solutions for their enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) needs. By leveraging the wealth of Open Source technologies and the contributions of the Open Source development community we are able to innovate much faster than commercial vendors. As a result, our goal is not only to provide an Open Source alternative, but to surpass all commercial offerings in terms of features, functions, and benefits. In other words, we don't expect you to adopt it simply because it's open, we expect that you will choose it because it's better.

OSDL.org

www.osdl.org OSDL - home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux - is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of IT industry leaders, OSDL is a non-profit organization that provides state-of the-art computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world. OSDL's founding members are IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC. A complete list of OSDL member organizations is provided on the member page at OSDL Members.

Virtual Iron Software - Data center virtualization solutions

www.virtualiron.com Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class, data center virtualization and management software solutions that help enterprises dramatically reduce the cost of managing and operating their on demand and utility data centers, and rapidly respond to changing business demands.

Companies find it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers today. As a result, IT departments are not able to respond as effectively to the needs of the business as they would like. The reasons are many. Most data centers are just too inefficient and complex. They’re expensive to build out and difficult to reconfigure as needs change. Hardware cycles continue to shrink, so enterprises have an influx of new equipment and applications that need to be rapidly provisioned. At the same time, new business applications are driving a proliferation of servers that are woefully under-utilized. In many cases, utilization is as little as 5-10%. The net result of all this is a very high cost of ownership for a resource that is poorly positioned to meet the needs of the business.

Virtual Iron’s data center virtualization and management solutions enable organizations to take control of their data center by dramatically reducing the complexity associated with implementing, updating and managing IT systems. With Virtual Iron, organizations can address their most challenging data center initiatives — and achieve rapid ROI in the process. Can be used in conjunction with grid solutions.

Cyclades - Out of band Infrastructure

www.cyclades.com 85% of FORTUNE 100 companies choose Cyclades as part of their strategy to preserve continuity and to reduce business risk and operational costs at data centers and branch offices.

Scalix - Enterprise Email and Calendar on Linux

www.scalix.com Today's enterprises require reliable, secure, cost-effective email server software. Scalix Enterprise Edition provides advanced email and calendaring for power users, including full-function Outlook support, group calendaring/scheduling, wireless email/PIM and other features designed for enterprises.

Levanta - Get More of of Linux (Appliance)

www.levanta.com Levanta is a leader in Linux management and data virtualization. Levanta's unique technology marries change control with data virtualization, delivering dramatically faster and more flexible control of Linux on commodity hardware, racks, blades, boxes, virtual machines, and even mainframes. Unlike traditional script-based or disk-imaging solutions:

The Levanta system is a breakthrough in provisioning, deployment, and change management for Linux environments large and small. Whether you use blades, rack servers, large SMPs, desktops, virtual machines, or mainframes, Levanta can dramatically improve the power and flexibility of Linux.

Levanta can:
* Provision a new server in under 5 minutes
* Migrate and reactivate a system from one hardware platform to another in minutes
* Provide a seamless transition between virtual servers and physical hardware
* Track byte-level changes with rollback
* Undo any change, made by any means
* Restore a server, even an unbootable one, to a previous, known, stable state
* Completely secure file systems, even from superuser changes

Levanta's customers include industry leaders in financial services, entertainment, government, retail and telecommunications. Levanta has partnerships with IBM, HP, Novell, and Red Hat.

Troux - EA and IT Governance Solutions

www.troux.com (BTM - business technology management) Just like manufacturing companies have a platform upon which they develop their operational support systems (ERP), shouldn't significant IT organizations have something similar? Doesn't there need to be a model of IT upon which IT Operational applications are build? That's Troux. Troux is also the new home of Metis, the well known EA toolset.

Troux Technologies (pronounced "true") is a global provider of IT Governance software to accelerate IT and business transformation. Troux's IT Governance solutions enable organizations to capture critical IT and business data, strategically plan the enterprise, verify standards compliance and manage the enterprise portfolios to transform the business. Troux's breakthrough technology provides the enterprise-class information, policies, and analytics critical for IT excellence. With Troux, organizations succeed in breaking the traditional IT silos and effectively aligning IT with core business goals.

IT Governance with an Enterprise Architecture Focus
Troux's approach to IT Governance is unique. Focusing on enterprise architecture, Troux provides an end-to-end solution to evaluate the enterprise current state, plan the future state and enable operational and strategic transformation activities to merge the two. With Troux, organizations create measurable business value by:

* Aligning IT and business architectures, eliminating redundant resources and yielding a 40% reduction in service provisioning
* Complying with regulatory requirements, yielding a 50% reduction in the number and severity of downtime incidents
* Rationalizing IT resources, yielding a 20% or greater reduction in infrastructure and application costs

Troux's customers include a well-established base of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 leaders in the biotechnology, consumer goods, financial services, technology, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, retail and telecommunications industries. Troux's Metis brand is synonymous with enterprise architecture excellence at dozens of deployments in U.S. federal departments, agencies and bureaus.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Metaphors - Executable Entities (Processes)

Metaphors > This language, envisaged by Victoria Livschitz, seems to have some relationships to BPM. BPM contains the ideas of a process virtual machine, process as an abstract manageable entity and process as concurrent distributed mobile communications (pi calculus). Quoting from a paper by Victoria:

"Q: What is an executable entity, and what problems does it solve?

A: I can observe that contextual programming constructs serve to formally define an application's abstractions and codify a programmer's thought process, not to do any "real work." That real work is the prerogative of computational constructs. Contextual programming statements therefore create logical -- not executable -- entities. They are of practical use to application designers who need to fix, extend, or reuse the context now or later. However, at runtime, some statements must be executed for a program to be of practical use to end customers.

It seems important to introduce a concept of executable entity, decoupled from the metaphorical constructs of contextual programming. Of course, executable entities may need to be generated from the contextual constructs. Something similar is going on in OOP, where executable entities (object instances) are generated from logical entities (classes). My executable entities, though, are going to be very different from conventional object instances that are sitting on a heap or a stack.

The world around us that we attempt to simulate, automate, and control via software is profoundly autonomous and asynchronous. When an apple falls from the tree and hits the ground, the phenomenon can be observed as a sequential process, but it cannot be understood as such. The sequence of events is accidental, an emergent property of the system tree-apple-ground. An apple falls autonomously when the force of gravity overcomes the force of the apple's attachment to the tree branch. The tree and the ground respond to the force applied to them by the falling apple with counterforce, also autonomously.

Unfortunately, modern programming is profoundly passive and sequential. Execution starts with some bootstrapping mechanism, like main(), that induces a chain of sequential, passive request-response invocations. Things like events and messages are special-purpose mechanisms that have been devised to allow for some illusion of autonomous behavior. True concurrency requires complicated multithreading machinery and a special-purpose programming model that is not only notoriously difficult to master but also inherently dangerous because of the unpredictability of deadlocks and race conditions.

Building concurrency on top of a sequential automaton is a bit like trying to explain quantum physics as an extension of Newton's laws. Both are probably better done the other way around.

I'd rather assume that everything is autonomous and asynchronous. Application runtime consists of autonomous executable entities, or agents, as some would call them. These agents interact with their environment and each other asynchronously, respond to external stimuli, and initiate actions out of "free will." They may exert a force or be subjected to a force field, which basically means that their ability to choose their actions will be constrained by the circumstances.

One interesting technical challenge is to devise a program execution model that will be able to efficiently support thousands -- if not millions -- of autonomous executable entities that are active at all times, even though truly interesting events happen to them only once every millionth or billionth cycle."

Cast Software - Applications Intelligence

www.castsoftware.com Too valuable to eliminate, too costly, complex, and interdependent to replace, existing IT applications consume a staggering 73% of application budgets. Organizations are embracing Application Portfolio Management (APM) because it develops fact-based application metrics to drive intelligent decisions, aligns application strategies to business strategies, and increases maintenance productivity by 10% to 30%

Friday, January 06, 2006

Infravio - Real World SOA

www.infravio.com Infravio provides SOA Infrastructure for software services to help organizations adapt to changing business needs and opportunities. X-Registry Platform is the market-leading SOA registry-repository solution. Integrators, ISVs and end users will find the X-Registry Platform to be the most flexible and customizable SOA registry-repository product in the industry.

Information Model APIs include the ability to customize schemas, processes, taxonomies, roles, groups and many other aspects of the SOA solution. These are achived through importing standard XML documents using a number of popular Web Services standards.

The information model APIs can be expressed as an industry verticalization layer. This can adapt the governance functions to the specific needs of vertical industries. These structures would include:

* Industry Standard Taxonomies
* Industry Standard Base Attributes
* Default Roles and Organizational Models
* Pre-Populated Service Definitions
* Verticalized governance processes

A number of industries are developing standard data structures which can be implemented in our registry information model. These standards include:

* TMF NGOSS, eTom, TML, DMTF CIM, and DMTF for Telecommunications
* ACORD and iLingo for Insurance
* FpML, FIX, ISO15022, and SWIFT for Financial Services
* OTA standards for Travel
* UDEF, Tax XML, Legal XML for Government
* EbXML for eBusiness
* AIAG standards for Automotive

Other vertical industries which are rapidly gaining standards relevant for SOA

* Petrochemical
* Health Care
* Aerospace
* Retail
* Manufacturing
* Utilities

Infravio has had successes in providing solutions in healthcare, telecommunications, publishing, manufacturing and many other vertical industries. Contact us today to see how Infravio can help provide solutions for your vertical needs.

Core Intellectual Property: Service Delivery Contracts(TM)

Infravio has invested substantial resources in the development of its intellectual assets including Service Delivery Contracts. Service Delivery Contracts are the culmination of the research by Infravio founder Mukund Balasubramanian at the Stanford University program in Computer Science. Infravio is the exclusive licensee of applications of the technology developed in part at Stanford University. Stanford is also a shareholder in Infravio Inc.

The patent-pending Contract based enterprise application services 10/863,773(60/520,230) one of the key technologies underlying Service Delivery contracts. It establishes preferential delivery of services by considering preferences, capabilities or limitations of each service consumer and at least one characteristic of a service provider. Through these service contracts, each service provider/service consumer interaction may be subject to an individualized set of interaction policies (e.g., set of service contract terms).

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Niku - Run IT, and Tech Innovation - Like A Business

www.niku.com Control and Predictability Through Clarity from Niku. Clarity from Niku marries the strategic to the tactical. It couples top-down portfolio planning and analysis with bottom-up project, program, financial and process management. The result is a seamlessly integrated system for IT Management and Governance (IT-MG), New Product Development (NPD) and Professional Services Automation (PSA). Clarity gives executives a real time view into their organization's investments, initiatives and resources, and empowers managers to deliver controlled and predictable execution of projects and programs.

Centrata - Enabling the Business of IT - Service Delivery Management

www.centrata.com Centrata Service Delivery Management Suite combined with Centrata's expertise provides IT organizations with a comprehensive solution to harness the complexity of delivering ever changing IT services. The components of the Centrata solution are:

* Centrata Service Catalog: a rich repository that centralizes all information and transactions related to IT services and service requests
* Centrata Design Studio: a productive authoring tool to define, manage and maintain all IT services with no coding
* Centrata Service Request: a self-service portal for IT customers to place service requests and for on-demand access to service request status
* Centrata Service Fulfillment: a back-end layer that enables IT to efficiently process and fulfill service requests
* Centrata Service Reporting: a reporting environment for IT to analyze request volume, service level compliance, and service delivery costs.

Black Pearl - Enterprise Decision Management

www.blackpearl.com Make every decision like its the only one that counts.

BlackPearl was founded with the vision of transforming the way companies make transactional decisions – the millions of decisions front-line employees make every day. BlackPearl believes that providing employees with the right information and advice at the point of the decision is key to optimizing companies’ response to day-to-day opportunities and risks, in turn leading to strengthened customer relationships, lower operating costs, and reduced business and regulatory compliance risk.

It sounds simple enough, but unfortunately reality often gets in the way. While investments in technologies such as Business Intelligence (BI) and CRM have put a wealth of data at employees’ disposal, there can simply be too much of it for any individual to sift through. And while BI tools are invaluable for performing analysis to support strategic decisions, companies lack the ability to optimize their day-to-day decisions. Consequently transactional business decisions are based on limited data, varying levels of expertise, and are often made too late to be effective. The result: lost revenue opportunities, increased costs due to manual analysis, and greater business risk from inconsistent decision making.

This is why BlackPearl pioneered an approach called Before-Time. BlackPearl’s Before-Time solutions automatically seek out opportunities and risks before they occur and provide notification and in-context advice in time to capitalize on them.

With several generations of technology already in the market, BlackPearl is currently powering leading enterprises in the financial services and insurance industries. These companies are using BlackPearl to proactively offer customers relevant financial advice, manage risks and business exceptions, maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and consistently apply policy to reduce regulatory compliance risk.

Black Duck Software - Lifecycle IP Policy Management

www.blackducksoftware.com As the leader in software compliance management, Black Duck understands the business and legal implications of intellectual property issues and technology licensing requirements facing software developers today in the US and internationally. We appreciate the strategic value leading industry partnerships provide in delivering comprehensive and flexible solutions to assess exposure and address risks.

Black Duck offers the protexIP suite of software compliance management solutions to help companies govern how their software assets are created, managed, and licensed. Black Duck's offerings enable companies that develop software using third party and open source components to catch and resolve intellectual property issues as they occur in development, instead of in the marketplace.

The protexIP system creates a new work environment that helps organizations effectively manage their increasingly complex software licensing obligations. By validating software contents, verifying license compliance, and finding and addressing issues early in the development cycle - or well in advance of a due diligence event. The protexIP platform helps companies reduce business risks, complete software projects on time and on budget, and stay on track with their business plans.

Spike Source - Business Ready Open Source Infrastructure

www.spikesource.com Deploying open source software in a production environment requires integration, configuration, testing, maintenance and technical support. That can be a tall order.

But we mitigate the risk of using open source by making your open source infrastructure business-ready—integrated, tested, configured and easy to install. We keep it updated in a secure and reliable manner. We minimize the resources you need to maintain it, so you can refocus more of them on your business. So you get all the upside of open source without the downside. It's the best of both worlds.

Learn more about how SpikeSource integrates, configures, tests, maintains and supports your open source infrastructure.

* Integration

Many open source components are developed as best-of-breed point solutions. They don't necessarily work well with other components. So you need someone to make sure they do. That would be SpikeSource.

* Configuration

Open source components come with configuration options. You may have a solution with X number of components, each having a number of configurations. That's like a machine with a lot of moving parts. It could take weeks to get it running smoothly. Do you have weeks? We do.

* Testing

Of course you're going to use your open source solution in a production situation. Otherwise, what's the point? But how do you know it's reliable, predictable and secure? You test it over and over. Every time a component changes, you test the component, you test the configuration, and you test the component and the configuration against the entire solution stack. That's interoperability testing. And we know all about that.

Our automated test harness runs in a production environment with all the other components in your solution. It tests in six language runtimes, on six different operating systems, including Windows.

* Maintenance

Maintenance is a big deal with open source because it's always changing. Change means constant innovation and improvement, but it requires more maintenance because each component is managed separately. A fix in one component could break something in another part of the stack.

Optarus - Realize the benefits of open source

www.optarus.com Optaros is a consulting and systems integration firm that helps enterprises solve IT business problems by providing services and solutions that maximize the benefits of open source software.

Bringing together experts in creating enterprise IT solutions and experts in the power of open source, Optaros plans and builds business systems that give you better value today and increased control in the future.

Whether your organization is a novice to OSS or an expert user, Optaros offers a full range of services for leveraging open source software to meet your business solution needs.

* Executive Education and Advisory Services
Optaros offers CIO-level seminars about how to successfully adopt open source in your organization. These seminars explore the latest trends, benefits, challenges, and pitfalls in open source. Optaros can also provide advisory services to help you sort through the thousands of open source projects that exist today, recommend the best OSS for your business application needs and your enterprise architecture, and build an open source roadmap for change.
* Custom Application Development Services
Optaros will assemble and integrate open source components, along with appropriate proprietary or commercial components, into a high quality and secure business solution that meets your needs.
* Business Application Integration
Optaros will customize and configure open source business applications for you and integrate these applications into your existing systems.
* Migration Services
Optaros can help you migrate part or all of an existing business application to a new set of open source software components.
* Support for Open Source Applications and Components
Optaros will provide application maintenance and support for any business application we build or any OSS components we recommend. We will train your IT organization in best practices for open source methodologies, open source software component usage, and open source licensing compliance and awareness.

Interactive Objects - MDA

www.interactive-objects.com Interactive Objects is the leading expert for solutions based on the Object Management Group’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA).

PointServe - Enterprise Service Optimization

www.pointserve.comy Real-time scheduling problems. Impossible decision choices. Demand predictions that are more often wrong than right. PointServe is at the forefront of making these kinds of challenges go away. We are a leading provider of service supply chain management solutions that allow smart companies, for the first time, to integrate, automate and optimize the performance of their distributed service operations. PointServe's Enterprise Service Optimization (ESO) solutions enable customers to predict service demand, then plan, schedule, and execute service delivery in a way that maximizes value across their extended enterprise.

Sonic Software - Connect everything. Achieve Anything (ESB)

www.sonicsoftware.com Through patent-pending innovations, Sonic Software's SOA and Web services infrastructure and enterprise messaging products have helped numerous clients rapidly and flexibly integrate services and applications across the enterprise.

*this - Enterprise 2 Factory Floor (E2FF)

*this Starthis, inc. is a provider of automation middleware solutions for enterprise to plant floor integration.

Starthis is the only provider of software which allows enterprise applications running on a J2EE Application Server to communicate directly with industrial machines and controllers.

The Enterprise 2 Factory Floor Manufacturing Information System (E2FF) provides tools, for IT and Operations professionals, to manage production information throughout the plant. Industrial automation control devices may generate sizable amounts of data, but no one benefits if it is locked up on the plant floor.

Turn your production information into useable work-in-process intelligence with E2FF. This is also the easiest way to facilitate collaboration between the IT and Operations staff. E2FF is designed to provide direct access to real-time plant floor data with the strictest supervisory security standards in the industry. No one has to compromise with the Enterprise 2 Factory Floor Manufacturing Information System.

E2FF resides at a central location in the enterprise, providing the tools needed to turn plant floor data into production intelligence. Production data is only valuable when it becomes useable intelligence delivered directly to the people who need it, when and where they need. E2FF turns work-in-process into knowledge throughout the enterprise.

Information Builders - The Standard for Enterprise Business Intelligence

www.informationbuilders.com Information Builders was founded over 30 years ago with a very simple mission – to help business people get to the information in their enterprise systems easily and quickly.

We succeeded. Today, our customers can efficiently put information in the hands of everyone they rely on to support, supply, run, and transact with their businesses. Thousands of customers and partners all over the world, including most of the Fortune 100, all major federal agencies, and many educational institutions, use Information Builders' software and services to turn data into actionable information that helps their customers, employees, managers, and business partners make better decisions faster. Information Builders helps companies achieve a competitive advantage in an "information now" world.

Service Integrity - Real time BI for SOAs

www.serviceintegrity.com Enterprises like FedEx and Dell achieve repeated success by leveraging the real-time information that runs through their businesses – Information-in-Motion. Whether it’s pinpointing a parcel or reducing just-in-time inventory, by building their own proprietary systems they have harnessed the power of the Information-in-Motion flowing around and throughout their business systems.

SIFT: Instruments Business Reality
Today, there is a framework available to harness the power of Information-in-Motion so that you too can execute like a category leader.

The advent of service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services coupled with the unique ability of SIFT to see, understand, and act on your Information-in-Motion, enables you to continuously improve your business. With SIFT solutions, you can optimize operational performance, measure service usage, detect fraudulent behavior, protect intellectual property, track customers, ensure regulatory compliance, and manage sales and marketing conversions – all in real-time.

SIFT is "reality BI", and it's different: It is business intelligence designed for every user, every day. It has a flexible, light-touch architecture that can be rapidly deployed. It's patent-pending StreamSensor(TM) technology automatically analyzes everything, and uses alerts, dashboards and autonomic triggering to drive the success of your business.

intersperse - In control of SOA

www.intersperse.com From today’s integrated J2EE applications through the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA), enterprise information systems are becoming more complex, more dynamic, and more vital to business success. To manage these systems, businesses need new tools that provide visibility, analysis and control of all tiers—from applications and data through web services and business processes.

Composite Software - Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

www.compositesoftware.com Composite offers award-winning Enterprise Information Integration (EII) software that enables enterprises to aggregate disparate data sources. With Composite, you can deliver a greater breadth of data and information in real time to a business intelligence tools and a variety of composition applications such as call center and customer self help systems. Composite features patent-pending IQ (Intelligent Query) optimization technology, which enables the highest performance in the industry. In addition, Composite is renowned for its ease-of-use, enabling users to quickly implement solutions with immediate business benefits.

Composite Information Server
The Composite Information Server (CIS) is a multi-threaded, 100-percent Java application that contains the query engine, library of views, cache and metadata repository; CIS also handles security.

Composite Studio
The Composite Studio is a powerful graphical development environment for modeling data, designing queries, connecting data sources, and setting security controls.


Composite Application Views
Composite Application Views unlock your information from SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft. Views decode application data, exposing it as standard relational tables. This allows you to query, and even update, complex applications directly. Unlike simple adapters, CAVs provide pre-built views of common business objects from SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft, eliminating most data complexities. Views can have immediate impact on your BI, dashboard, or composite application projects.

LogicLibrary - Know what you have - Move ahead

www.logiclibary.com Logic Library is the leading provider of software and services that help organizations manage their software development assets. The company serves Global 2000 enterprises that value application development – in-house or outsourced – as a competitive advantage, but also to increase productivity and reduce costs.

Companies benefit from using LogicLibrary’s Logidex if they want to:

* Secure, manage and govern their service-oriented architectures (SOAs)
* Make software reuse a reality
* Fulfill the potential of enterprise architectures
* Consolidate, migrate and/or integrate their enterprise applications

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services have become mainstream in the past year due to their ability to provide business agility and flexibility through integration, productivity and software reuse. Everyone agrees that reuse of software development assets (SDAs) is a “good thing” and that service-oriented architectures (SOAs) require organizations to institutionalize services as reusable assets. Nonetheless, there is considerable debate within IT organizations as to how to “get from here to there.” Moving from the current state of IT project development, with its emphasis on immediate, time-driven project objectives, to “SOA nirvana,” with flexible, loosely-coupled services that are produced from requirements driven by core business processes, is not an easy task. With Logidex, however, enterprises can move towards this goal incrementally by securing and managing development processes for SDA production, distribution and consumption.

What is Logidex?
LogicLibrary Logidex is a software development asset (SDA) mapping and discovery engine that represents inherently complex, enterprise application environments in a graphical, intuitive way. Software development assets can include: executables (e.g., components, services, frameworks) and their associated software development lifecycle artifacts (e.g., requirements documentation, UML models, test plans), as well as knowledge assets, such as best practices and design patterns. The Logidex SDA Library is an inventory of SDAs and their relationships to each other, the company’s business processes and the technical infrastructure. A consumable library of SDAs, coupled with strong process control, is the basis for enabling and managing enterprise SOA initiatives.

WebLayers - Governance, XML, Web Services, SOA

www.weblayers.com WebLayers is the premier provider of SOA Governance and Conformance solutions enabling Government and Fortune 500 enterprises to achieve a true Service Oriented Architecture.

Today’s IT organizations are moving swiftly at all levels to adopt service oriented application design and deployment processes, hoping to gain significant business and technical benefits. Throughout this process, these organizations are discovering the many challenges inherent in this new approach, challenges which stem from a complex, heterogeneous, and highly distributed development environment.

The WebLayers Governance platform brings the first and only comprehensive solution that connects enterprise-wide projects, architects, project leaders, and the individual developers enabling these groups to all develop towards a true Service Oriented Architecture from the initial design effort thru to the service deployment.

metallect - Enterprise Application Visibility

www.metallect.com IT is at the core of modern business. And at the core of IT are the dozens or hundreds of applications that run the business.

In order to execute your company's business strategy, you must be able to quickly align your applications with changing business needs. But for most IT organizations, change has proven to be a major challenge. Due to enormous complexity and declining application knowledge, everything is harder and more expensive than it should be. Application enhancements and modifications are expensive and risky, and flexibility is limited. As a result, most companies spend over half of their IT budget – tens of millions of dollars each year – just maintaining existing apps. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Enterprise Application Visibility can help your company cut cost, reduce risk, and keep your apps aligned with business needs.

The Metallect IQ Server(TM) is the first complete solution for Enterprise Application Visibility. IQ Server delivers an unprecedented level of insight into the inner workings of applications — so you can slash maintenance costs, reduce risk, and boost application ROI. It provides for enhanced application maintenance, compliance and modernization.

Blue Titan - The Services Networking Company

www.bluetitan.com Successful SOA solutions require a future-ready architecture and an incremental deployment approach that evolves with organizational needs. Blue Titan Network Director, a fifth generation product, enables you to take a services networking approach and makes this a reality.

Blue Titan's services networking approach enables incremental deployment of SOA-based solutions, and helps avoid costly accidental architectures that can develop as your environment evolves. Services networking with Blue Titan Network DirectorTM delivers successful, enterprise-ready SOA-based solutions by:

* Enabling rapid deployment of SOA environments with unparalleled scaling that can grow as your business needs evolve
* Preventing accidental architectures of disparate information silos through mediation capabilities that translate across heterogeneous environments, protocols, and standards
* Preserving existing investments through seamless integration with current infrastructure

A Network Director-enabled services network is a loosely coupled network of service providers, service consumers, and Network Director Control Points (Blue Titan's implementation of network intermediaries) that intelligently route XML/SOAP traffic, enforce policy, and mediate run-time concerns within a heterogeneous environment. In a services network, all messages passing between the standardized service interfaces (for example, WSDLs in Web services implementations) of service providers and service consumers are routed through a network of Network Director Control Points. The services network guarantees service interoperability across boundaries and encourages service sharing. A services network is the optimal way to share services across an SOA.

With a services network, organizations can govern run-time infrastructure concerns - message routing and delivery, authentication, and monitoring - freeing scarce development resources to focus on business logic. A Web service can be registered and provisioned into a services network, irrespective of its run-time environment (for example, .NET, J2EE, legacy/packaged applications, etc.). Once provisioned, the service can be managed through and shared across the services network, providing a universal way to expose, access, and reuse existing logic, information, or processes. Organizations realize improved efficiency, consistency, and cost containment across their IT environment.

Services networks make services:

* Sharable - Services can be reused across the organization leading to improved consistency and reduced development and maintenance costs
* Compatible - Services networks can mediate incompatibilities that exist between services in heterogeneous environments (for example, SOAP to Raw-XML, one WS-Security spec to another, etc.)
* Evolvable - Network Director Control Points can modify SOAP message envelopes and headers and make existing SOAs future ready, insulating them from changes in standards, protocols, and software assets
* Composable - The services networking approach provides a uniform framework for accessing services, so that deployed services can be dynamically modified to accommodate evolving business needs

DataSynapse - Adaptive Grid Infrastructure Software

www.datasynapse.com DataSynapse provides adaptive grid infrastructure software that virtualizes access to on demand computing and data resources, creating a scalable service execution environment, enabling greater business agility at lower costs. Our GridServer and FabricServer products virtualize applications and provision them across system resources to eliminate performance barriers and improve productivity levels across the enterprise.

DataSynapse is the fastest-growing provider of grid computing software for commercial applications today. The company's award-winning, production-proven infrastructure software, GridServer, creates an on-demand operating environment that powers all types of mission-critical applications. From legacy to web services, DataSynapse optimizes applications across an enterprise's virtualized computing resources.

The company was founded in 2000 to address the escalating demand for computing power needed to meet business objectives. Founders Peter Lee and Jamie Bernardin formed DataSynapse to deliver revolutionary new technology - distributed computing software that would enable organizations to capture their existing computing power and optimize its use for applications company-wide.

Unlike many other "grid computing" solutions, DataSynapse takes a unique, application-centric approach. DataSynapse helps clients expand business performance while reducing computing costs. Based on trends of commoditization and standardization, the company's GridServer solution can dynamically distribute and manage application workload in an on-demand grid-operating environment.

An Industry Innovator and Market Leader

DataSynapse's solution, GridServer, is the only production-proven solution that extends applications in real time to operate in a distributed computing environment across a virtual pool of underutilized computing resources. DataSynapse's GridServer software creates a self-managed grid computing infrastructure, that generates unparalleled levels of application scalability and reliability, while optimizing computing resources and increasing revenues.

The company's vision has been validated by the growing number of industry leaders that have deployed GridServer - from Wall Street to the public sector. DataSynapse has virtualized their computing infrastructure - from mainframes to servers to desktops - and is delivering measurable business impact. Client implementations have been lauded by Waters, Securities Industry News, Bank Technology News, and Insurance Networking News, earning coveted industry accolades year after year.

Headquartered in New York and London, DataSynapse is a global provider of grid computing for the virtual enterprise in the financial services, manufacturing, energy, and telecommunications and government sectors. The company also has offices in Washington DC, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Jose, Milan and Paris.

Streambase - When Now Means Right Now

www.streambase.com StreamBase(R) Systems was founded by Dr. Mike Stonebraker, a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century.

Mike is the founder of three successful Silicon Valley startups and was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Mike was a Professor of Computer Science for 25 years. Currently, Mike serves as the CTO of StreamBase Systems and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T.

From 2001 - 2003, Mike and a distinguished team of 30 professors and students from M.I.T., Brown University, and Brandeis University developed a new software platform to apply the familiarity and benefits of SQL to the processing demands of high performance real-time streaming applications, where a response is needed within milliseconds.

In 2003, StreamBase Systems was founded (original name, "Grassy Brook") to commercialize the university prototype with financial backing from two premier venture capital firms, Bessemer Venture Partners and Highland Capital Partners. In January 2005, Accel Partners led a second round of venture capital that also included Bessemer Venture Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

StreamBase Systems combines the knowledge of the academic researchers with a team of industry veterans who have a track record for developing and marketing new technologies and products that have gained broad IT industry adoption.

The company's President and Chief Executive Officer is industry veteran Barry Morris. With his strong background in building middleware and systems technology organizations, Barry leads the company in delivering products and solutions that help customers react right now to the growing volume of real-time events hitting their organizations — one of the major unaddressed challenges in the next generation of computing.

The company's core software was the result of more than four years of research, product engineering, and usability and performance testing. The product features a high performance, enterprise-class server that can be configured via a graphical interface to solve demanding real-time processing and analytical problems.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

VI Agents - M2M Agents

www.viagents.com VI | Agents is convinced that large RFID, Auto-ID and M2M roll-outs will happen only if solutions are simple and affordable.

Machine to Machine (M2M) communication takes advantage of Sensing Device technologies in combination with in-built intelligence and the connectivity capabilities available today. M2M networks may comprise home appliances, HVAC thermostats, water controllers, utility meters, sensors and alarms to form a reliable network and communicate over the Internet to enable value added services. But M2M is not about technology. It´s about enhancing existing and enabling new business processes.

VI | Agents´ focus on the value of business processes means that our products and services are fundamentally process-centric. We believe that signals and sensors are enablers for right-time action/re-action within a value network. The combination of Sensing Device technologies and software agent design patterns, within VI | SixD, make simple and cost effective M2M services a reality.

Kx Systems - Billions of streaming or historical records

www.kx.com Applications such as trading and risk management have required high-performance databases for years, and now virtually all industries are experiencing the challenges of implementing scalable databases that can be queried in realtime.

With traditional relational database systems, you must make a trade-off between fast inserts or fast queries as the database grows. Today, millions of records of streaming data are collected daily, and query speed is being compromised. Kx products are designed to scale for fast analysis without compromising data management.

Kx products have been architected for high performance in demanding database environments. Kdb+ offers scalable performance for data capture, storage, relational management, and analysis, all in one system. Kx technology provides:
1. a single database for streaming and historical data, enabling seamless data analysis with realtime results, even on billions of records.
2. exceptional developer productivity, with a single language for programming and data querying, plus the ability to support time-ordered analysis.
3. products on 64-bit and 32-bit technology running on cost-efficient, industry-standard hardware platforms.

Cassatt - Smart Infrastructure - Horizontal Scaling

www.cassatt.com Collage creates an on-demand, automated and virtualized, computing infrastructure from your existing servers, networks and storage that aligns your computing resources to your ever-changing business needs. With Collage, you create simple policies for balancing server resources across your applications. Collage assigns resources to meet your service level—then automatically reassigns them as conditions change. Used in conjunction with an SOA or Web services layer and as part of IT automation in the data center environment.

Collage continuously monitors resources in a non-intrusive manner and corrects problems by reallocating hardware from a shared free pool or by pulling resources from lower priority or less heavily loaded applications. By sharing resources and balancing them across applications, Collage increases reliability on demand to all applications—extending high availability to all applications based on priority, not just the most critical.

Cassatt automates IT operations for your Linux, Windows and Solaris servers, improving the efficiency, flexibility and availability of your business operations.

Not a grid technology, but a related technology. Cassatt is a member of the GridAlliance.org.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

StoredIQ - Information classification & management

www.storediq.com For Business: StoredIQ mitigates legal, financial, asset, security and audit risk by ensuring that enterprise information is managed according to Compliance, Acceptable Use and IP protection policies. For IT: StoredIQ lowers storage and administrative costs, and reduces risk through "content driven” automation of information security, storage optimization and retention policy.

Today’s business and government enterprises have billions of discreet files, individual e-mail messages and electronic records. StoredIQ assists in the discovery, protection, preservation and maintenance of this information by “reading” over 70% of an organization's information and: Identifying which information is valuable; Identifying which information represents business, legal and regulatory compliance risk; Protecting each class of information according to that institution's policy; Insuring that information is retained (and retrieved) according to policy.

StoredIQ provides information lifecycle management (ILM): A rapid, content-based definition of information categories or classes; The discovery and classification of information relevant to a business or security policy; The execution of security, retention and location policies on classified information; Creation of a comprehensive audit trail of the ILM classification and management process.

DATAllegro - The next generation of Data Warehouses

www.datallegro.com Data warehouse appliances may revolutionize the world of data warehousing. Instead of purchasing software, hardware and storage from multiple vendors and utilizing thousands of hours of DBA time to integrate and maintain them, an appliance does the job for you. DATAllegro’s data warehouse appliances bring together a comprehensive set of leading-edge technologies that have been integrated and tuned for world-class performance, out-of-the-box.

Most of the existing parallel data warehouse technologies are based on research dating back to the mid-eighties. At that time, disk storage was so expensive that every effort was made to avoid the duplication of data. Unfortunately, this led to the network between the parallel servers becoming a bottleneck. As a result, very expensive proprietary hardware was required to overcome this problem and achieve acceptable performance.

Looking at the problem from the perspective of the 21st Century, DATAllegro realized that we had the opportunity to take advantage of a much more powerful and cost effective hardware platform: new SATA drives such as Western Digital's Raptor have SCSI performance and reliability at much lower cost; 64-bit CPUs from Intel offer unprecedented processing power at low cost; 20Gbps Infiniband offers affordable, very high speed networking. Combining this new hardware with open source operating systems such as Linux and mature open source databases such as Ingres, provides an ideal platform on which to build a next generation data warehouse appliance.

Taking this new platform as a starting point, DATAllegro invented a new way of distributing data across a number of servers and then running queries in parallel – all without requiring any expensive proprietary hardware. The end result is a true breakthrough in data warehouse price/performance. Instead of paying millions for a traditional system, companies can achieve a 10-100x improvement in query performance, at a fraction of the cost of other providers.