Which Cloud Model is the Next “BIG THING?!"

IBM's purchase of Cast Iron resulted in another new integration product in the market by IBM, called IBM Cast Iron. I find this product interesting and started working with the technology. Cast Iron provides an approach to connecting to Public Cloud, Private Cloud and On Premise applications. Recently, a colleague and I presented on this topic at an IBM conference about Cast  and Cloud Computing.

It didn't take me long to understand that the market is buzzing with the term Cloud. It seems everyone wants a piece of it - IBM, Google, Amazon, Salesforce and many other organizations. Naturally, every industry implements its own model and tries to become a market player in this. I started my journey with Cloud recently. Though there are many confusing terms, let’s talk about some business model that Cloud brings us:
a. Software as a Service – SaaS
b. Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS
c. Platform as a Service – PaaS
d. Business Process as a Service – BpaaS

I thought it would be interesting to see which Cloud model is presently more successful, attracts more market and investors and will maintain the trend in future and thereby become the next big thing in market in next decade.

According to market predictions, I found that cloud computing is expected to cross $121 billion by 2015. SaaS holds currently 73% of markets revenues; this is the largest segment of cloud computing services market. IBM is one of the global leaders in SaaS. I have gone through numerous surveys and market research and it is easy to deduce that SaaS is by far the most successful and will remain so for many reasons.

1. Firstly, its price policy is one of the major factors which has made it very popular and unbeatable. This provides better perks for small business and small scale start up companies, allowing them to avoid the high expenses of purchasing and maintaining software. Any extra hardware for setting up the business is dispensable, makes it more cost effective.
2. Secondly, the ability to figure out web traffic in one’s internet based business through different web services such as Google analytics or Google AdWords provided by SaaS makes it very effective to track customer preferences and user behavior and thereby setting the business in the right track.
3. Thirdly, the availability of personalization and customization of application makes it very popular.

Here I should mention that all the above points make SaaS a very cost efficient and practical application for startup companies and small businesses which is one of the most important reasons for the growing popularity of SaaS. To take a deeper look, let’s compare the small business establishment trend and the rising SaaS popularity. An infographic by Intuit explores the costs of starting a new small business in the United States compared to other markets around the world.

http://infographicworld.com/intuit-small-business-in-the-u-s-and-abroad/

The graphic shows that starting a business in the US is relatively easy compared to the largest markets in Asia and a few places in Europe At the same time, user survey analysis conducted by Gartner and others has already discerned that North America is the largest consumer of on demand solutions. This region shows the highest SaaS deployments in expense management, financials, and email and office suites.

Now let’s consider Asia pacific , between 2011 and 2012 we see , SaaS revenue for this region has hiked by approximately $200 million. Asia Pacific includes markets in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and emerging markets, including China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Among them India and China are the leading users of SaaS financial applications. Now if we go back to the infographic by Intuit we can clearly see that the next best countries for starting small business are India and China. This shows a direct correlation between the SaaS usage and their market in regions with booming small business.

It seems the popularity of SaaS will continue in North America especially when the President’s 2013 Budget Bill has given immense importance on supporting small business. The Budget will provide $16 billion for Small Business Administration and thereby expanding small business and in turn generate jobs. Thus SaaS seems to be the next big thing which is here to stay in USA considering its popularity in the small business sector.

Looking at the direct correlation that we observed between the booming small scale and start up businesses in the world market and the growing popularity of SaaS among them, it is easy to conclude that the SaaS Cloud application is definitely the next Big Thing.

Next month, I will be attending IBM Impact in Las Vegas. To learn more about Prolifics' solutions and what we have planned for Impact, visit our conference page.

Note: Market data was referred from Gartner, Intuit and various sources.

Sources:
http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/applications.jsp
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/it-spending-forecast/

Arup Datta is a Solution Architect and Integration Specialist at Prolifics and an IBM Champion for WebSphere. Arup has expertise in providing end-to-end solutions leveraging IBM technology across several industry verticals, including Finance, Banking, Retail and Insurance.

Europe's Consumers Embracing Online Retail

British Computer Society (BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT) has highlighted a new report from Forrester Research predicting Europe’s consumers will shun the high street in favour of online over the next few years.

The research firm also predicts security challenges to e-commerce providers, given the annual growth rates and marks UK to be one of the countries leading the way.

Read the BCS News Flash here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/50111

In a recent blog entry, I outlined how Prolifics was able to help a High Street Retail Giant refresh their e-Commerce website using IBM technology. If you missed it, you can read the story here: Prolifics UK Helps High Street Retail Giant Refresh their e-Commerce Website.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.

Prolifics UK integrates Retailer’s B2B e-Commerce Platform with Blazing Fast Search Engine

Business Challenge:
A UK High Street Retail Giant not only sells its goods to the general public but also to other companies, including UK franchises, international franchises and many smaller overseas customers who stock their products as part of their range.

Our hugely successful Retail Customer decided to grow the B2B arm of their business. In order to do so, they needed to not only expand their existing B2B e-Commerce system capacity but also to find a way to speed up the searching and indexing of their products on the system so that they could more quickly and accurately be made available to their Customers using the website.

Solution:
As part of the Apache Lucene project, Apache has developed Solr, which it describes as “a popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform”. Major features include “powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.” The Solr solution is “highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more.” And is claimed to power the search and navigation features of “many of the world's largest internet sites.”

Prolifics in partnership with IBM, assisted this High Street Retail Giant in successfully expanding their B2B e-Commerce solution by providing deep product expertise which enabled the Customer to grow their WebSphere Commerce infrastructure. Prolifics also architected and developed the infrastructure solution for the implementation of Apache's "Solr" Search & Indexing application to run on WebSphere Application Server and its integration with the Customer’s B2B e-Commerce platform . This Retail Customer is now armed with a flexible and blazing fast e-Commerce website to offer its new and existing B2B customers.

(Quoted reference: Apache website. Learn more about Apache Solr here: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/)

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.

API Blog Series Part 1: APIs – The Next Evolution of Service Oriented Architecture

Talk technology trends today and you cannot complete the sentence without referring to SCM [Social, Cloud and Mobile]. These three domains have changed the way businesses use technology. In this blog series I will focus on the fourth key emerging area in the technology space – APIs - the foundation on which the Social, Cloud and Mobile revolution gains more adaption. In this blog entry I take a look at the evolution path of what is called API Management today.

Remember the SOA books or articles in early 2000. The most common picture I saw in every book –Provider, Client and UDDI [Yes, I still remember that acronym]. I refer to that era as SOA 1.0. The buzzword was ‘Web Services’. The standards (WS-*) were still evolving, the big technology vendors – IBM, ORACLE, TIBCO were still struggling to get mature tools and products to market and enterprises were still trying to understand this value proposition of services.

Then came the age of SOA 2.0 – the standards were formalized, interoperability was achieved, ESB was no longer a pattern – it was a product, it was no longer about Web Services – it was all about a disciplined approach called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the new buzzword was “Governance” - UDDI was gone and an Enterprise Services Registry & Repository became the norm. However SOA 2.0 focused more on the Enterprise - services were more for internal consumption or to be consumed with key business partners outside the enterprise.

The innovation that changed the SOA world again did not happen at IBM or at TIBCO or at ORACLE – it happened first in Apple [iOS App Platform] and then at Google [Android] – The World was now Mobile and the new buzzword was ‘App’. Millions and Millions of developers who build mobile apps entered the ecosystem and they needed a standard way to access data and logic. Enterprises saw this as an opportunity to get into new business models to generate new revenues by tapping into these developers who could build new applications for the capabilities that an enterprise already provided. However they needed a standardized way for the development community that was completely outside their control to interact with their services. The world of SOA could no longer be confined to the walls of the enterprise – ‘It had to go public’.

Enter API Management and Welcome to SOA 3.0
While the acronym API is as old as technology itself, in today’s world, API Management is about publishing and promoting the core business capabilities of an enterprise as publicly available services. The intent of doing this is to allow the vast development community out there to consume them in a secure and scalable manner and use them to build new applications that will bring new business and revenue models for both the provider and the consumer of the API.

In the next set of blog entries on this topic, I will delve more into the key features of an API platform, the competitive landscape and will focus the IBM API Management Platform to build an end to end API Solution.

Next month, I will be attending IBM Impact. Prolifics, a Gold Sponsor, will showcase our BPM, Integration and Mobile solutions across various speaking sessions and at booth #G-1 on the Expo floor. To learn more about Prolifics' expertise, visit www.prolifics.com.

Rajiv Ramachandran is the Vice President of the SOA & BPM Practice at Prolifics and an IBM Champion for WebSphere. He has 15 years of experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working in the development teams at its Object Technology Competency Center in Bangalore, India. He was then a Solution Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman's Fund Insurance. Currently at Prolifics, he manages a 100+ member worldwide team that focuses on BPM, SOA & Decision Management. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has presented at IBM Impact and IBM WebSphere Services Technical Conference. He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Prolifics UK Helps High Street Retail Giant Refresh their e-Commerce Website

Business Challenge:
IBM believes E-commerce is “no longer simply about selling online, it's about delivering a consistent shopping experience across all customer touchpoints, including mobile, social and in-store”. In 2010, a UK High Street Retail Giant made the decision to relaunch its e-commerce platform. Their existing transactional web site, developed in the early 2000s needed to be totally re-engineered, so they embarked on a journey to find the right solution.

Solution:
IBM’s WebSphere Commerce suite is at the heart of the new web site. IBM describes their WebSphere Commerce suite as allowing Customers to “deliver a seamless, cross-channel shopping experience through contextually relevant content, marketing and promotions, while extending their brand across all digital and physical customer touchpoints.” The product does so by providing “a powerful customer interaction platform for cross-channel commerce”, providing “easy-to-use tools for business users to create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalogue and merchandising across all sales channels, allowing them to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy.” WebSphere Commerce is further described as “a single, unified platform which offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), with businesses (B2B), indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models), or all of these simultaneously” and “a customisable, scalable and high availability solution built to leverage open standards.”

Prolifics in partnership with IBM, assisted this High Street Retail Giant successfully implement their WebSphere Commerce solution by providing deep product expertise to ensure a stable and scalable application infrastructure for the Customer’s new flexible, e-Commerce platform. This new platform puts this Retail Customer ahead of its competition and enables their cross-channel selling strategy.

(Quoted reference: IBM website. Learn more about IBM WebSphere Commerce here: http://www-142.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/websphere-commerce/)

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.

Charting Capability in Portal using WEF V8 and DOJO APIs

Charting capability in Portal using Web Experience Factory (WEF) V8 and DOJO APIs This article will show you how to create Charts in WEF V8 using DOJO Charting API to develop custom charts using other than commercial APIs like Fusion Charts or Highcharts JS APIs. So I started building a sample chart demo in WEF V8 using DOJO APIs which shipped with WEF designer.

I followed following steps to create sample Dojo chart in WEF V8:

1. Created an empty model called dojochart_view.model in one of existing WEF project.

2. Added Page builder as first builder.

• Inside the page1 code, added two separate div, one for loading chart component and other for the chart legend.

• Also, at the top of the page1 html, added two separate span one for loading the DOJO css and other for loading the DOJO JS code.

3. I added a "Client JavaScript" as second builder and selected dojo.js api shipped with WEF V8 designer, path as /factory/dojo/dojo/dojo.js.

4. Then I added Style Sheet as third builder and selected the claro theme as below.

5. I added another "Client JavaScript" builder to add the basic code to load the DOJO charts. In this JS I load the charting DOJO require apis and sample data to display the chart. To develop this, I referred one of the samples Dojo chart example from http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/tutorials/1.8/charting/ code.

5. Finally added Action List builder to add the main function to load the page1 and saved the model. I could have made page1 as main to avoid this builder.

6. I ran this model in the browser and DOJO charts appear as below -

Conclusion:
This is one of the quick ways to develop chart in any WEF Portal application using DOJO APIs and customer experience can be enhanced. Using DOJO charting APIs developers can create dynamic, unique, and functional charts from different sets of data. Also DOJO Charts provide multiple theme and different types of charting support.

To connect with me, follow me on Twitter: @vishwanathsinha

Vish Sinha, a Senior Consultant for Prolifics, is an experienced Portal and JEE Architect. He specializes in providing Enterprise SOA solutions with different IBM WebSphere stacks and portal solutions. Currently his main focus area is leveraging Web Experience Factory in providing Portal solution to customers. He has played different IT roles ranging from being an Architect, Technology Consultant, Technical lead and Software engineer for several large projects. Vish has done an excellent job in implementing solutions across verticals like Finance, Insurance, Telecom, Retail, and Healthcare for several of Fortune 1000 customers. Vish has a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering.

Prolifics Welcomes 15 New Hires!

Earlier this year, Prolifics welcomed our largest group of college hires as 15 talented new consultants joined our family. Each new hire is an exciting addition to our team and we look forward to watching their careers grow at Prolifics! Over the course of several new blog entries, we will provide some brief introductions to these bright, young consultants!

Joshua Hatfield

"As someone who recently graduated college with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, finding a job in the field of technology was my number one priority. While I researched several positions, Prolifics emerged as the clear choice for the start of my career. No other company offered the value that the College Hire program presented as far as exposure to a wide variety of technologies, a thorough training program, and an established and well-reputed network of employees with unrivaled expertise to work with. I am looking forward to learning everything this training program has to offer, as well as mastering the technologies I will be leveraging as a consultant.”

Greg Sullivan "I graduated from Touro College in 2011 with a degree in theoretical mathematics, and in the mean time I was enrolled in Baruch College for a Masters in Information systems and I was doing math models for companies privately as a means to earn extra income. I believe consulting is an excellent way to learn new skills, interact with various people, and become more informed in business overall. I am excited to be a part of Prolifics as it is providing me the opportunity to acquire new skills and to grow within the company. The college hire program is an excellent idea as it helps us develop into pivotal members of this company."

Aditi Bhaumick

"I graduated from Columbia University with a masters in Electrical Engineering. I took a couple of courses from Computer Science but this program is awesome because it gives us hands on experience as well as an opportunity to learn from the basics."