I'm a bad blogger. I've been very quiet lately. It's that time of year, after our fiscal year ends, but before we announce our results, and so I've obviously been busy with customers (remember them?) but can't really share the excitement.
I was trying to find the recording from last month's online eBizQ conference and ran across a blog entry by Joe McKendrick (one of my "must-read" industry analysts) talking about EDS' AirlineSOA initiative, and in particular the Lufthansa Airlines project.
SOA What?
Well, which SOA management vendor do you think underlies AirlineSOA?
I'd also point you to a recent post by Anne Thomas Manes that highlights the single most important "new product" that should be budgeted for in SOA implementations... that of a management solution.
It's interesting that both Anne and Joe blog about the same thing... Anne in the abstract, and Joe in the specific. I know AirlineSOA and Lufthansa in particular, use a host of different technologies from various vendors including TIBCO BusinessWorks. But, the only "fashionable" product used differently from the past (when it was just "airline" not "airlineSOA") is Actional.
What do you think of that? (I think it's pretty cool; but clearly I'm biased.)
And, there's more. Why do you think EDS selected Actional?
Performance.
For those of you reading this evaluating your own solutions, I'll share that EDS put a big effort on behalf of Lufthansa to make sure the performance was what they needed. This wasn't a simple "show us what you got, we're going to dump on the vendor" POC. They knew their environment and they invested the time in understanding our architecture, how it mapped to their environment, and how to optimize it all together. If you're serious about evaluating an enterprise tool, you need to make a serious investment in understanding it.
Of course, I still haven't found that recording (in part because I wrote this post). EbizQ has a new face on their site, and it's a big improvement, but old recordings are still hard to find (or, I'm just an idiot).