The folks from Cordys presented their view of the new business operations platform. Current systems development is in the context of four key game-changing trends:

Consumerization
Not just technology but can deliver business processes as services using the Internet
Commoditization
Virtualization
Not just of hardware but of processes and teams
Globalization

In this environment, processes are a key competitive advantage - much [...]

I got a briefing this week from my friends at Tibco about their Service Performance Manager product released a couple of months ago. The product is a big step along the road to what some call “autonomic computing” in that it provides dynamic and automated monitoring and correction of service levels in a service-oriented world.
The [...]

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

The folks at ILOG and Relativitiy recently announced a new integration between their products - Legacy IT Modernization enabled by ILOG and Relativity Technologies Business Rules Solutions. I got a chance to chat with them today about what was new and different in this latest attempt to bring legacy modernization and business rules together. Relativity’s [...]

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

Joe McKendrick in his Eye on the Enterprise blog had a post on legacy modernization - Time to Cut COBOL from Life Support in which he referenced a post by James McGovern The mainframe is not evil, but COBOL is… in which James says
that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with [...]

Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information - e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing - people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]