Fluxology Alliance

The Fluxology Alliance is a network of companies, from large to small, and independent consultants. The Alliance is committed to work together with Sun to build successful implementations with JavaCAPS and OpenESB, but also to spread the knowledge and awareness about other Sun's opensource solutions (Opensolaris, MySQL, Glassfish, Netbeans, ...). There are hundreds of former SeeBeyond customers out there and many of those are looking for migration path from eGate 4.x, ICAN 5.0, JavaCAPS 5.1 to JavaCAPS 6 and the new opensource Sun's offering.

The Alliance is mainly focused on the EMEA market. The idea was born because Sun needed more expert partners to help its customers dealing with large SOA / EAI implementations. Partners are distributed quite everywhere from Southern to Northern Europe, most of them are composed by former SeeBeyond and Sun employees with a long term experience around Java enterprise technologies and a deep knowledge of Sun's business. The membership is mainly about fair cooperation and exchange of information.

"Fluxology facilitates two cooperative global partner networks around OpenESB, JavaCAPS, its SeeBeyond predecessors, enveloping the Sun Java Enterprise System and complementary technology partners, to pave a pathway into the future towards "the adjacent possible" in both business relations and information technology."

On my side I'm a member of the Alliance as an independent consultant and already a Sun external contractor. If you want to learn more please point your browser to Fluxology.Net.

Frank Kieviet interview on OpenESB at DZone

Dzone hosts an interview to Frank Kieviet, OpenESB Community Manager, about OpenESB, Java CAPS, Glassfish and future directions. It is a good summary of the present status, how difficult has been to get the former SeeBeyond suite as opensource and where it aims to go in the next few months.

From my point of view the OpenESB suite still lacks two major components:

1. A SOA Governance solution. A good registry / repository is an important side component of any ESB, at present Sun should at least establish a commercial partnership with other vendors about that, the strategy here seems a bit confusing and no clear message is available for consulting partners and end customers. My opinion is that OpenESB needs to partner with solutions having a similar dual opensource / commercial license, a closed-source only registry product could lead to difficult sales propositions.
   
2. A ESB management and monitoring console. The ESB Console project is very late, even if it seems a version 1.0 will be released within this year. Any ESB needs robust and easy monitoring and this can't be sold by suggesting users to build their own through JMX or other APIs.

A good SOA Governance suite should allow for easy monitoring and management, repository and versioning of files (for example, versioning WSDL is not enough, the imported XML messages need versioning). Then it should be a single place to apply orthogonal policies for security, auditing, billing, ... The model should be of a policies gateway, working in combination with the ESB as a services proxy.

So far, lacking an integrate offering from Sun, I am evaluating myself some third parties Governance solutions to suggest to my customers, some are quite nice and works well with OpenESB and Java CAPS.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized by Jonathan Jarvis, an interaction and media designer, is one of the best explanation of the present credit crisis I have found on the Internet. It also a wonderful example on how to create a beautiful visual presentation.

GlassFish ESB Roadmap

The OpenESB community just released a roadmap for this year. Things are accelerating.

GlassFish ESB v2.1

Scope:

* NetBeans 6.5
* GlassFish 2.1
* Full support for GlassFish clustering
* Scheduler BC
* Misc. performance enhancements
* Bug fixes

Target date: Mid May 2009


GlassFish ESB v3

Scope:

* NetBeans 6.7
* GlassFish 3
* Light weight composition
* IFL
* Maven Support
* OSGi
* Interceptors
* ...

Target date: Sept 2009

So the most interesting will be GF ESB v3 scheduled for September 2009. Glassfish V3 is a micro-kernel based app server running on a OGSi platform. The IFL language is an effort to simplify common ESB tasks and implementing a domain specific language, much like Apache Camel, to implement common enterprise integration patterns and messages manipulation (routing, filtering, splitting, pipelining, ...).

The OpenESB and Java CAPS consulting ecosystem

Sun's new open-source strategy offers interesting consulting opportunities. In the last months I have worked closely with former SeeBeyond and Sun colleagues to build a network of partners able to independently support the free OpenESB and commercial Java CAPS platforms at all levels. A set of very skilled professional left Sun recently and joined the freelance market or started new companies. Most of these expert people were actually also in charge of developing core aspects of the Glassfish ESB, Java CAPS and MDM suites, so it is possible to even offer product's enhancements and customizations. Sun is supporting this effort, so we are more and more closely coordinating activities with Sun Services in US and EMEA.

It is a huge paradigm shift from SeeBeyond. When I was in SeeBeyond everything was closed and even secret, while Sun is now growing as an open company embracing open-source as a way to tackle the market from a very different angle than its competitors. At the beginning many Sun employees were doubtful about new Sun strategy, it is so distant from the company's culture. Sun was, and partially still is, an hardware and infrastructural software vendor, a company built by engineers for engineers, with a technology language and culture. Integration and SOA are much more related to pure business aspects, customer's expectation are very different because they take for granted that the technological problems are solved, what they want is business integration, which requires a lot of consulting expertise. This kind of combination of technical and business expertise is exactly in the DNA of former SeeBeyond consultants.

The network of partners is growing and able to fill the business gap. SOA is not much related to technologies, it is about designing and fitting an Enterprise Architecture, it requires first to understand customer's business needs. The OpenESB ecosystem is made of a set of commercially supported open-source tools which provides the possible best value for money. Now there exists also a worldwide consulting services offering able to put this software effectively in production.

OpenESB is an open community, where Sun, its partners and customer can collaborate to create the best set of features, pro-actively suggesting functionalities and corrections. In which ways OpenESB offering is different from both big vendors and other similar open-source products?

• It is fully open-source and supporting open standards, so you can really avoid any vendor lock-in
• Full commercial support and indemnification is optionally provided by Sun at much cheaper prices than any other big vendor
• You can download the suite, develop your solution and then decide if and when buy commercial support
• Comparing to other open-source ESB, support is provided by a much bigger company, the one who invented Java
• The set of development and runtime environments (Netbeans, Glassfish, OpenMQ, JBI) is very mature and allows for better developers productivity than other open-source ESB
  

Netbeans make a big difference: this is a great IDE and the company behind it is the same building OpenESB, so you get a closer integration between the IDE and the ESB in the whole development cycle. Other products require you to edit by hand lot of configuration files, IDE integration is weak and often provided by third parties, unless you decide to buy a much more expensive commercial ESB from any other big vendor. Glassfish V2 is now a great JEE 5 application server, Glassfish V3 is going to be the market leader in terms of features.


So, what are the real services a customer can expect from the network of professional OpenESB partners?

• High level consulting expertise, most consultants are former SeeBeyond and Sun professional services. No kids, senior people only with up to 25 years experience
  
• Possibility to leverage both Sun's technical support and the open-source community, to get independent advices
• Ability to modify or create custom JBI adapters, as many companies in the network are OpenESB code committers and some were even Sun product managers (can you really ask your Big Vendor to create a custom adapter for you?)
• For previous SeeBeyond customers there is also a lot of added value, as the network can offer tailored migration plans from DataGate, eGate 4.x, ICAN 5.0, JCAPS 5.1 to OpenESB and Java CAPS 6
• Ability to support big enterprises worldwide. I'm in touch with partners from Israel to Scandinavia, and in US also. We are looking for partners in Australia and New Zealand shortly.
• Any vertical market: retail, healthcare, telecommunications, finance, energy, ...
• Any EAI experience: SAP, Siebel, Oracle, CICS, SWIFT, Microsoft, ...
• Identity management, Role management & provisioning, Security, Master Data Indexes, federated SSO, SOA Governance, Business Process Management, Rule Engines.
• On going partnership discussions with Savvion, Fair Isaac, Autonomy and other specialized vendors.

An independent and comprehensive review of Glassfish ESB can be read here.

For more information about the "unit-42" partnership network, please drop an email to me or my business partner.