ESB Persists As Application Integration Tool

ESB products swept onto the scene as the latest generation of enterprise application integration technology and a replacement for older message-oriented middleware. The ESB's initial role, going back to the early 2000s, was to translate different data formats, let applications communicate with each another through a messaging layer and make sure the messages passed among applications reach the intended target. By 2005, ESBs had become the foundation for service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments. The technology took on the task of coordinating Web services.
Over the years, though, SOA has lost some of its appeal as a term of art. "Services" of late have been recast as application programming interfaces, and API management tools have emerged as a product category. In April, CA Technologies inked a definitive agreement to purchase Layer 7 Technologies, an API management vendor, underscoring the growing interest in the field. The rise of cloud computing, meanwhile, has generated new types of integration challenges and technology remedies.

Against that backdrop, ESB has entered yet another transitional phase. Jason Bloomberg, president of ZapThink, a Dovel Technologies company, says there's a lot of noise in the market for and against ESBs. ZapThink, based in McLean, Va., offers training in certification in SOA and cloud computing.
"It's a little hard to cut through and find out what's really going on," Bloomberg says. "Customers are generally confused about the whole thing."
ESB vendors, however, contend that their products will continue to have a role in both traditional integration and as a core component of new applications. Along the way, the technology must navigate overlapping API management capabilities and cultivate niches such as Software-as-a-Service integration.
ESBs at Work: Integrating Disparate Systems
Enterprise customers, for their part, continue to carry on with ESB. That group includes some recent adopters such as NCR Corp. The company deployed MuleSoft ESB software about 18 months ago, notes Eli Rosner, vice president of global software engineering at NCR.
Rosner says ESB offers the ability to handle complex integration while providing speedier time to market. The technology lets developers integrate applications quickly, as it offers built-in connectivity and shields them from having to deal with individual connectors. "ESB as an integration engine is very important to us," Rosner says.
ESB helps NCR bring together three key domains: The company's data center, a customer's data center and the public cloud. The integration technology can unite a SaaS solution hosted in an NCR facility with an enterprise resource planning system at a customer's location and link both into public cloud technology, Rosner explains.
In one example, NCR uses ESB to integrate a loyalty program system it's building for a retailer. The system will involve an NCR-developed Facebook app hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and NCR's own data center resources. It will let customers participating in the loyalty program opt into retailer offers via Facebook. ESB, in this case, will tie the different elements together.
In a different scenario, ESB may be deployed to help organizations reconcile legacy point of sale gear with a new payment system. A company could have a mix of legacy and new POS technology, but the data generated by the older POS devices exists in a format incompatible with the backend system.
POS transactions can be routed to NCR's ESB, which then determines whether it came from a legacy or new POS based on the device ID, Rosner says. "Based on a rule, [the ESB] then triggers a transformation of the data to the one accepted by the system."
Rosner estimates that NCR's ESB handles hundreds of concurrent connections but adds that the number of connections will grow exponentially once the company works through the initial challenges of the deployment.
ESB 'Agnostic To the Technology Platform'
Another ESB user, Social Interest Solutions, a Sacramento, Calif. nonprofit that builds health and social services systems, has been deploying the technology for several years.
Social Interest's ESB is built on Microsoft BizTalk Server and Windows Communication Foundation. The ESB is part of the organization's One-e-App system, which lets people submit one application for multiple health and social services programs. The ESB includes a rules engine that contains the eligibility requirements for various programs; organizations in Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana and Maryland use One-e-App.
Ashok Rout, chief technology officer at Social Interest, sees a continuing role for ESB technology. The organization is now expanding its Arizona system to help the state meet its Affordable Care Act mandates. The system, slated to go live October 1, will use the ESB to integrate with federal and state systems. The connections will be used to verify income and other eligibility criteria. ESB will also provide a mechanism that other states can use to leverage features or functions of the Arizona system.
Rout counts support for different integration methods among ESB's enduring qualities. "The beauty of ESB is that is allows you to be agnostic to the technology platform [and]...the integration you are doing," he says.
Rout notes that his organization's ESB allows Web services, APIs or flat files to be integrated. An ESB designed to be agnostic can accommodate new integration approaches as they surface. "ESB is going to be critical in the future," he says.
ESB, API Management Coming Together
While customers see a stable role for ESB, the technology itself is far from static.
"I've seen a lot of evolution in the ESB marketplace," notes Paul Fremantle, co-founder and CTO at WS02, which provides an ESB among other enterprise middleware products. His background includes building one of the first XML Web service gateways, which found use in 2003 as an early ESB at Charles Schwab.
News: Software AG Goes All Out for In-Memory ESB
Freemantle cites the convergence of ESB and API management functions among the current technology trends of note. He says ESBs have taken on the quality of service, usage throttling and access control roles that are typical of API gateways. On the other hand, API management vendors have effectively incorporated a number of ESB capabilities into their products, he adds.
WS02 offers both technologies, having launched an API management product in September 2012. Freemantle says newer customers are adopting both products and using ESB and API management components where they see a fit.
Ross Mason, founder and vice president of product strategy at MuleSoft, agrees that ESB and API management are coming together. "API publishing and management have become a very big piece of what enterprise integration is today, he says.
Mason says APIs have become the mechanism for connecting endpoints that exist outside of the firewall-cloud platforms and SaaS systems, for instance. He adds that mobile devices also need APIs to connect back into enterprise systems.
With that in mind, MuleSoft in April debuted its Anypoint Platform, which includes Mulesoft ESB along with API-related components such as APIhub, a public API respository; Anypoint Service Registry, a cloud-based registry for API governance, and Anypoint API Manager. The latter module is in beta now and slated for availability in mid-2013, according to Ken Yagen, vice president of products at MuleSoft.
Future developments may overtake both ESB and API management. ZapThink's Bloomberg believes Integration as a Service, which traces its roots to B2B integration products, will emerge over time as the next generation of ESB and API management. In the meantime, enterprises will turn to ESB and API management to pull together in-house applications and a growing population of external endpoints.

Inside the Latest Office-Design Craze: Hot Desking

As cloud computing and wireless Internet become ubiquitous, workers are cordless. Who needs a cube, much less an office? Just follow the leads of these cool companies.

Square

 

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The cubicle's days are numbered.
A concept called "hot desking" is rewriting the rules on how companies should landscape their work environments. By ditching desks and dividers, the hot-desking faithful make the entire office--and more--their workspace. This free-range approach, in which employees (and their laptops) shuffle between open tables, couches, and stations, encourages greater collaboration and innovation among co-workers. The beauty with hot desking is that (unlike its cubed counterpart), there's no right or wrong way to do it.
We spoke with founders and managers at five companies to get a feel for their different approaches to ditching assigned seating.

Josh Dunford | Founder of Burnkit Studio | Vancouver, British Columbia
 "Burnkit's design studio is a warehouse in a formerly industrial area pushed up against the harbor and the railway tracks. The space has a character that's a little bit raw. I liked the rawness compared with a climate-controlled cubicle. It's a working warehouse, and I like the feeling of work. What I love about it is that there's room to think. We have a 22-foot ceiling, and in a creative space like ours, it gives us room to think. We're a creative crew, and we have creative teams inside our space, so we like the open environment. The desks are custom made and completely open, and we're set so that we can turn our screens and face one another. It's nice to be able to see everyone, and to have a level of connection and contact. Just with our size, only 12 people, we are like a family. Our culture here is that we trust everyone, and the space is conducive to that style."



Maja Henderson | Office manager of Square | San Francisco
 "We have a completely open floor plan. It creates this really open, comfortable environment where people can just walk up and engage one another in a way that wouldn't happen with a typical office. There are so many environments that the day ends up flying because you're constantly moving. We don't want our employees sitting in one chair all day, because that's not good for them and it's not good for collaboration. We just get these really great intersections of people and ideas. For instance, a lot of times our CEO, when he has some down time, will hang out at a stand-up table to do some work. And that provides an employee the opportunity to have some face time with him. They'll start chatting, and then someone else will see them and walk up to talk. This keeps happening, and then suddenly and randomly, we'll have these conversations with people from finance, legal, design, and you get these collaborations that wouldn't otherwise occur. I love how flexible it is, and that there are always different people sitting at my desk. It makes me feel more in touch with my co-workers and what's going on in the company."



Navin Thukkaram | COO of Qwiki, an interactive video start-up | New York City
 "Our office, located in SoHo, is essentially one large loft space with exposed brick and a high ceiling. And we wanted to maintain the integrity of that openness. We spent a long time wondering how openness would affect the culture and collaboration of the team, and what we came up with was a series of very long desks, 12 feet or so by five feet. We've been here about eight months, and the results are A+ so far. The intention was to have a collaborative work environment in which our Web team could collaborate with the design team and with the CEO. And I think a lot of that has happened; everyone works together seamlessly. When people are just talking together, that's when the magic happens. Since our shared desks are so large, we all eat lunch and dinner together very often. Having those casual conversations goes a long way. We're always looking for those "a-ha" moments, and those are easier to come by when you have a lot of smart people around the table, and I think that's true for a lot of tech companies."


Jess Hanebury | Community manager at Threadless | Chicago
 "The office is like an elementary school setup, with pods of four desks facing one another. But you can turn around, and there's another pod behind you. Each department is close to the others. By being right near the production team, we get to see new stuff that's happening. They'll try out new stuff for our select lines, dresses, and more. And sometimes, we get to contribute and let them know what we like. That open structure really makes it easier for people across departments to throw in their two cents. At Threadless, the roles are defined, but you don't have to stay confined within your little niche. Since I know what new products we have coming up, I can plan ahead. By being six feet away, I'll hear that a product is coming, and then I can plan an event in advance. I can literally still sit at my desk and talk to people in other departments about strategies. It's far easier to say, 'Let's go sit on the couch.' Impromptu conversations are much easier when you're right next to one another. It's about 10 times easier to hash out ideas. Collaboration is the best part of the job, and you can't get that in a cubicle."


Brooke Moreland | Founder of Fashism, an online fashion and community retail site | General Assembly incubator space in New York City
 "We loved the community and having a bunch of other companies around for social reasons. I'd be wondering aloud: 'How do I do this on PhotoShop?' And someone from another company on the other end of the room would yell out, 'Its Control + P!' Just having other people there with other knowledge sets was cool. Fashism had its own little cluster so we could talk and build our own culture. We were able to bond a little bit more as a team. But there wasn't a lot of privacy. So when you wanted to talk about things that were sensitive to your company, we had to talk in code all the time. And if you're getting in an argument, it gets a little embarrassing to have other companies watch you. So you're a little bit more under a microscope. Mostly, there's good energy. It's just contagious to be around people who are passionate and excited by what they do."

Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows

What's about to change over the next few months is thatHadoop is coming to Windows in the form of Hortonworks DataPlatform (HDP) for Windows, a fully supported open source Hadoopdistribution that runs on Windows Server. (Hortonworks, aCalifornia-based company, is a sponsor of and contributor to theApache Hadoop project, and it already offers its Linux-based HDPdistribution on a commercial basis.)

This will open up Hadoop to a large number of organizations thathave no in-house Linux skills. Shaun Connolly, vice president ofCorporate Strategy at Hortonworks, explains the thinking behindmoving HDP to Windows in this way: "Essentially it's amarket-driven decision," he says. "Hadoop is built forthe scaleout commodity hardware market, and the commodity hardwaremarket is 70% Windows by install base and expertise."
Employees in Windows-only companies will be able to make use ofHadoop easily because Excel can be used as a business intelligencetool to view the results of Hadoop Big Data analysis (whetherHadoop is running on Windows or Linux). "Ideally we wantMicrosoft users to be oblivious to the fact that everything iscoming from Hadoop," says Connolly. "If end users canconsume data without any learning curve, thanks to tools likeExcel, then they get more value."

Windows shops will also be able to benefit from Hadoop onWindows because IT staff with Windows skills will be able to writeHadoop applications using Microsoft's VisualStudio and .Netframework, without the need for any Linux expertise. (As an aside,both Hortonworks' and Microsoft's Windows offerings are100% Apache Hadoop -- there have been no tweaks to the code--so anyLinux Hadoop app could easily be ported to Windows, Connollysays.)
But it turns out that HDP for Windows is not the only way thatHadoop is coming to Windows. Microsoft has been working behind thescenes with Hortonworks since late 2011, and the Redmond giant isabout to release its own distribution of Hadoop which it callsHDInsight. This will be available as a service running in thecompany's Azure cloud, or as a product that's intended tobe used as the basis of an on-premise private cloud Hadoopinstallation.
A decade or so ago Microsoft was resolutely anti open sourcesoftware, and ironically it may be that its support for Hadoopstems from this old animosity, according to Wes Miller, an analystat Directions on Microsoft. "I think part of the reason thatMicrosoft wants Hadoop on Windows is out of concern about thecompetition Linux poses," he says.

But there's another reason to, he says. "The companyalso wants to ensure that if you do use Hadoop, you can also useSQL's BI stack for the business intelligence part."
3 Ways Businesses Will Buy and Use Hadoop Capabilities on Windows
The quick and easy option is to use the Azure service, accordingto Eron Kelly, general manager of product marketing forMicrosoft's data platform. "This is an ideal way toconsume Hadoop technology as it can be complicated to run usingopen source projects," he says. "With Azure this can bedone in a couple of clicks and you then pay for what youuse."
Companies do have other options for accessing Hadoop in thecloud -- by running Hadoop in Amazon or Rackspace clouds, forexample. But for companies that already use Azure, with largeamounts of data (and logs) in that cloud, then the HDInsightservice certainly would appear to make sense.
For companies that want to manage and run their own Hadoopinstallation, HDP for Windows is probably the option to go for --as long as they have their own Windows servers and are prepared toinstall the software and get it going. Support is available fromHortonworks. "This could be appealing to companies that havegenerally had a no open source software (on Linux) policy. The sortthat may have wanted Hadoop, but only wanted it on Windows,"Wes Miller points out.
HDInsight Server for Windows will allow larger enterprises totake advantage of their existing investment in Microsoft'ssoftware stack -- particularly the cloud management capabilities ofSystem Center -- to incorporate it into a private cloud. And itneedn't be expensive -- the product is available as a freedownload, Kelly explains.
"There's no incremental fee for using HDInsight Serverfor Windows--we will monetize it by customers having to buy WindowsServer to use it--and maybe from them using our data warehousing orBI environments as well," he says. "We may also monetizeit by selling newer versions of Excel," he adds. (Microsoftoffers an Excel 2013 and 2010 add-in called Data Explorer which canconnect to HDInsight instances in Azure or on-premises.)
The big question mark over HDInsight Server for Windows iswhether any but the largest companies will actually want to use it,Miller fears it may be too complicated. "Will smaller sizedbusinesses really want to run Hadoop in a private cloud? Maybe ifit is all automated, but I don't think that Microsoft is goingto be doing that," he says.
There's no doubt that Hadoop's arrival on Windows issignificant, because it will bring Big Data analysis within easyreach of the vast Windows market. (Hortonworks' Shaun Connollyestimates that by releasing HDP for Windows, the company willdouble the potential market for HDP immediately.) And by loweringthe barriers to entry for making use of Hadoop, smallerorganizations and even business departments will be able to benefitfrom insights gained from the analysis of Big Data.

Jive Software adds integration tool for its enterprise social platform

Jive Software has released an add-on to its enterprise social networking (ESN) software that automates and simplifies the process of integrating Jive's suite with third-party systems.
The add-on is based on technology Jive acquired when it bought a company called StreamOnce. At launch, the StreamOnce add-on links Jive's ESN suite with the Gmail and Microsoft Exchange email servers and with the DropBox cloud storage app.
Later on, it will integrate Jive's product with ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software from vendors including Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, SAP and SugarCRM. The StreamOnce add-on is available now. Jive officials declined to say how much it costs.

Prior to acquiring StreamOnce, Jive had made custom integrations between its software and several third-party products, including Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration server, Microsoft's Outlook email client, the Box cloud storage and file sharing app and Salesforce.com's Chatter ESN product. Jive also provides a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that external developers can use to create bridges between their applications and Jive's software.
However, the acquisition of StreamOnce was prompted by Jive's belief that it's crucial at this point for ESN software, such as its own, to be easily and deeply integrated with customers' business applications. That way, people can use Jive as their primary collaboration "hub" which is connected with their work applications.
Above all, a product like Jive's can't exist as a stand-alone tool, said Tim Zonca, the company's senior director of product marketing. "Social software isn't a destination," he said. "People shouldn't have to be tab-hopping among applications. We want to provide a cohesive experience."
ESN suites like Jive's offer users a set of social media tools adapted for workplace collaboration, including employee profiles, activity streams, wikis, discussion groups, microblogging, tagging, comments and document sharing. However, recent studies from several IT research firms have found that often these tools don't generate the necessary engagement level among end users. When this happens, these products fail at their core and basic mission of improving and increasing communication and collaboration among employees.
For example, in an ominous prediction, Gartner recently said that through 2015, a staggering 80 percent of social business efforts will fail to achieve their intended benefits, due to what the company called "inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology."


Unsurprisingly, ESN vendors are heeding the warnings and boosting their efforts to make their products easier to integrate with third-party business applications. Their goal is to make it easy for end users to tap the social collaboration capabilities that their ESN tools provide within the context of the software they use most frequently at work.
Despite the challenges and growing pains, ESN software is hot. In June of last year, IDC forecast that between 2011 and 2016 the compound annual growth rate for enterprise social software will hit 42.4 percent, taking spending from US$767.4 million in 2011 to almost $4.5 billion in 2016.
Meanwhile, Gartner predicted that by 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal enterprise social networks, of which 30 percent will be considered "as essential as email and telephones are today."

IT Salaries on the Rise

  After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, new research shows IT professionals last year earned their largest annual salary increases since 2008.
The 2012-2011 Salary Survey from Dice, an online career site for technology  professionals, found that U.S. IT specialists on average garnered salary increases of more than 2 percent, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327, from $79,384 in 2010.
The average bonus, $8,769, and the number of technology professionals receiving bonuses, 32 percent, also saw increases from 2010, according to the study.
Industries most likely to pay out bonuses include telecom, hardware, banking, utilities/energy and software, the research showed.

"Compensation has mustered some momentum, as more and more top tech markets are notching increases in pay," said Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice. "The increasing popularity of bonuses shows companies are rewarding their top performers."
In Silicon Valley, ranked second only to Houston as the best place for IT jobs nationwide, annual salaries topped six figures for the first time since the survey began about a decade ago.
 Silicon Valley's annual IT salary of $104,195 was the highest in the nation, and increased 5 percent from 2010, according to the study. Bonuses also are fatter and more frequent there, with 38 percent of tech professionals receiving an average of $12,450.
But it wasn't just the IT-rich Silicon Valley that recorded a jump in salary increases. The research revealed Austin, Texas, saw the largest salary increase, with a 13 percent jump in pay, to an average of $89,419. Other cities experiencing increased salary growth include Portland, Houston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles.
"Silicon Valley’s compensation moved first and wrote the playbook for highly qualified tech professionals to ask for more — whether that be in Seattle, Houston or Raleigh," Silver said. "Nationally, we’re seeing stiffer competition and higher salaries for tech pros with the right skill sets and the right experience level."
The research was based on surveys of more than 18,300 technology professionals nationwide.

Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox

The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Mozilla has been testing a patch from Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford University in computer science and law and online privacy activist, which like Apple's Safari browser allows cookies from websites already visited, but blocks cookies from sites not visited yet.

A pre-build version of the browser, called Firefox Aurora, was released on April 5, and included the patch to only allow cookies from sites visited. Aurora is a preliminary stage in the development cycle before Beta and Release of a version of Firefox.
The plan by Mozilla to block third-party cookies by default in upcoming Firefox releases was criticized by the online advertisement industry, some of whom said that cookies serve other purposes like data theft protection and analytics besides advertising. The move will affect small businesses that make up the diversity of content and services online and consumers' ability to manage their own privacy, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which called on Mozilla in March to withdraw the planned changes to the Firefox browser.
Mozilla is now worried about "false positives," such as if the patch blocks cookies from websites associated with a site the user has visited. If a user visits a site named foo.com, which embeds cookie-setting content from a site named foocdn.com, as a result of the patch, Firefox will set cookies for foo.com, but block cookies from foocdn.com because it was never visited directly, even though there is one company behind both sites, Eich wrote.
On the flip side, just because an user visited a website, he may not be comfortable being tracked all over the Internet and on unrelated sites, which is a "false negative" that the patch could allow.
Mozilla said it needs more data and refinements to the patch before it can ship a version of it which blocks cookies from unvisited sites by default, and has asked for volunteers from its Beta and Aurora releases. The Beta for Firefox 22 was released Thursday.

inspirational

As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.

Marketing

Steve Jobs certainly did.
Sure, he was Apple's CEO, but more than anything, he was a consummate marketer. He understood that, more than anything, his job was to come up with products that people really wanted to use--even if they didn't know it themselves. He also knew that product developers live for that sort of thing.
Indeed, Bill Davidow, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former Intel executive said, "Marketing must invent complete products and drive them to commanding positions in defensible market segments." He should know. He wrote the seminal book on high-tech marketing.
David Packard, the iconic co-founder of Hewlett Packard, took an even broader view of the significance of marketing when he famously said, "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department."
Marketing and business are synonymous. Some of the most powerful business strategies and concepts come from marketing. And they can be applied to any individual, product, or company. Here are seven from my experience in the high-tech industry.

You only need a focus group of one. If it's the right one. Crowd sourcing and collectivism may be popular these days, but business success is almost always the result of a simple idea by an individual or relatively small team. Apple's executives never used focus groups. They had themselves.
The power of positioning. In a competitive market, you either differentiate or die. Of the relatively few things you can actually control, positioning strategy comes second only to the product itself. How you position yourself, your products, your company, is perhaps the most powerful and underutilized tool for differentiating anything.
Control the message. In a world of information and communication overload, controlling the message--what you say and how you say it--is a lost art. If you can boil complex concepts down to simple messages and stories people can connect with, that makes all the difference. Not only does every word count, but so does how and when you say it.
The customer is and has always been king. That doesn't mean you just do what they want. It means that you need to understand your audience, your customer base, and focus on giving them an experience with your company, its products and services, and its people, that will delight them and keep them coming back for more. In a world where just about everyone is focused on themselves, that's how you stand apart.
You can't win without a defensible value proposition. If you can't articulate what you bring to the market that nobody else has or does better than you, you won't beat the competition. And that doesn't mean you can just BS. If it doesn't pass the smell test, if you can't say it with a straight face, if customers don't wholeheartedly agree that it's true, forget it.
Brands still win. Bob Pittman has run everything from MTV and Nickelodeon to Century 21 and Six Flags. While he was president and COO of AOL--back when that meant something--he said this: "Coca Cola does not win the taste test. Microsoft does not have the best operating system. Brands win." Microsoft may not have the cache it did back then, but you know what he meant. Some say branding is dead. Don't believe it. Nothing's changed.
Competitive markets are a zero sum game. It's a competitive world. It takes a lot to win. The equation that determines the success of your product, your company, even your career, has many variables. Business is all about how effectively you use and control those variables, many of which are described above. I guess there are other ways to win, but then, you're just making already tough odds a whole lot tougher.

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http://laliwalait.com/online_training_india.html

Activiti BPM public training at Singapore

Attune University provides three days Activiti BPM public training at Singapore June 10-12,2013

Activiti BPM Public Training Singapore, June 10-12, 2013

JOIN US AT THE Singapore, Activiti BPM Training Register Now Attune University provides three days training on Open source BPMN 2.0 standards and Activiti BPM. This is unique opportunity for Technical Architect, Project Manager, System Integrator and Senior Developer to learn installation, configuration, design and deployment of BPMN 2.0 business processes using Activiti. After this training you will be familiar with BMPM 2.0 business processes, services orchestration, process deployment, execution, testing and monitoring using Activiti and also Activiti integration with Mule ESB and jBoss Drool.

Follow on Linked In | Friend on Facebook | Follow on Twitter Copyright © 2013 Attune University, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: training@attuneuniversity.com Our contact number is: +65-3158-5078

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Dish asks FCC to suspend review of SoftBank's Sprint bid

 Dish Network Corp asked U.S. regulators on Thursday to stop reviewing SoftBank Corp's <9984 .t=""> proposed acquisition of Sprint Nextel Corp's , citing the Japanese company's reported attempt to thwart its bid for the U.S. wireless carrier.
The request follows a Reuters report on May 10 that SoftBank asked several Wall Street investment banks not to finance Dish's $25.5 billion offer for Sprint by saying such a move could hurt their chances of getting a piece of the public offering of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd . SoftBank owns 33 percent of Alibaba.
"If SoftBank has the power to influence crucial financing decisions of a Chinese company and enlist those decisions in the service of its effort to acquire Sprint, then the proposed foreign ownership needs to be assessed in light of this Chinese company as well," DISH said in the letter to the Federal Communications Commission.
"SoftBank is trying to force its offer on Sprint's shareholders by underhandedly seeking to undermine a superior bid," Dish wrote.
The Japanese telecom company, which has an existing agreement with Sprint to buy 70 percent of the U.S. wireless carrier for $20.1 billion, has criticized Dish's offer, saying it does not have committed financing in place.
Dish has lined up four banks, Barclay's Plc , Macquarie Group , Jefferies and the Royal Bank of Canada , to help finance its proposed offer, people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.
An FCC spokesman declined to comment and Sprint could not be reached for comment.
A SoftBank spokesman said, "This is yet another irrelevant and unfounded filing based on unsubstantiated media reports."
(Reporting By Nicola Leske, additional reporting by Soyoung Kim and Olivia Oran in New York and Alina Selyuk in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013/05/16/dish-asks-fcc-to-suspend-review-softbank-sprint-bid/#ixzz2TX7KT63K

Automation will change the way virtual and cloud environments are managed.

. CREDIT: Automation image via Shutterstock View full size image

Is your company getting too big to avoid automation? It might be time to consider workflow automation.
Ben Rosenberg is the president and founder of Advanced Systems Concepts, which is a provider of ActiveBatch enterprise job scheduling and workload automation, which allows IT organizations to automate and conquer IT boundaries by simplifying the development of business processes into workflows that improve service levels and reduce the cost of operations.
Rosenberg says automation is here to stay and outlines the fivebiggest trends in automation for 2012.
Automation will change the way virtual and cloud environments are managed. Cloud and virtualization are accelerating the demand for automation. Why? Because running jobs and processes across diverse machines and infrastructure requires resources. In virtual and cloud environments, resource allocation is key for the execution of workloads and to receive the savings associated with cloud computing. Bringing virtualization and the cloud into the automation equation is an elegant way to automatically allocate resources to workload processing where and when they’re needed, and to return those resources for use elsewhere once the workload is completed.

Self-service automation will serve the entire organization. Business processes are increasingly interlinked and reliant on IT technologies. The concept of self-service automation is simple: The end user of a business process can choose from a service catalog within an IT automation solution and initiate the process themselves – without the need to involve someone from IT operations. For example, a business analyst needs an updated report from a BI solution. The process of updating such a solution could involve multiple IT technologies, but with IT automation, that's something the business analyst doesn’t need to worry about.
A single automation engine will emerge as an automation solution. IT automation is made up of a number of disparate automation solutions that can trace their roots back decades, such as batch processing, runbook automation and workload automation. The idea of IT automation is to bring all these foundational pillars under one roof into a unified and centralized automation solution that accounts for all these plus a number of complementary technologies and capabilities, such as infrastructure monitoring, running IT processes on-demand and automating the resources associated with cloud computing. This concept of a "single automation engine" has come to full maturation. Look for leading vendors to focus their offerings around this concept in 2012 and for the foreseeable future.
Automation will reduce the cost of IT operations. The number of disparate technologies comprising IT departments is growing, but staffing and budgets remain the same. IT automation will begin to serve as the catalyst to drive efficiency and reduce the cost of operations through the automation of time-consuming and resource-intensive processes, and through the reduction of errors from manual intervention and scripting. IT automation has been delivering these results for years, but in 2012, with automation moving to center stage and widespread adoption, its value will really become evident.
Automation will automate big data and data integration. Businesses, both big and small, are increasingly relying on data to make critical decisions in near real-time. As the volume of data increases, so does the number of disparate data sources that feed into data warehouses and business intelligence solutions. IT automation will become a linchpin in 2012 that automates the integration and movement of data between these disparate sources to improve data quality and reporting.

Why is Amazon Supporting an Internet Sales Tax?

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It looks like the Marketplace Fairness Act--the official name for a proposal to allow states to collect sales tax on internet sales made to their residents--will pass the Senate sometime today.  It will have a tougher time in the House, where Republicans still aren't keen on supporting anything that smacks of higher taxes.  Still, it's remarkable, at least because it shows that under the right circumstances, you can get at least some members of the GOP to support a tax increase.

I wrote about this plan a couple of weeks ago, noting that the biggest issue with the bill is the disproportionate burden it will put on small businesses.  Amazon can afford to pay a small army to hassle with states who claim that Amazon isn't paying enough tax.  Mom's Cupcake Bakery and Cable Store cannot.  

The really interesting story of this whole case is Amazon's shift from a staunch foe of taxing the internet, to one of its biggest boosters.  A few years back, Amazon was waging a scorched-earth campaign against states that attempted to collect sales taxes from internet businesses.  For example, when various states passed laws claiming that affiliate links represented a physical nexus in those states that would allow them to collect taxes, Amazon said they were closing down associates who were residents of those states.  

Both the states and Amazon clearly believed that freedom from sales tax constituted a major competitive advantage for Amazon.  Yet a few years later, they're all sunshine and smiles when it comes to taxing the internet.  In fact, they're lobbying for it.  Why the shift?  

Because, whatever the history, Amazon's competitive advantage no longer derives from its tax-free status.  Amazon is the cost leader on most products even before you add in sales tax.  They're a marketplace killer because their giant warehouses are vastly more efficient than even a big box store.  They require fewer staff per customer, and they don't have to be decorated nicely.  They can be located in the middle of nowhere, instead of prime shopping mall real estate.  (Bonus: wages in the middle of nowhere tend to be lower than in dense urban areas).  And you don't have to air condition them to the point where an Emperor Penguin could happily summer in the cell phone section.  (Though at one point Amazon seems to have decided that you didn't need to air condition them at all, which was a problem.  They've since upgraded their warehouses with more creature comforts).

Amazon doesn't need to be salestax free to compete with brick-and-mortar resellers; it needs volume, which it has, and convenience, where it lags slightly behind the big boxes.  The solution is to open more warehouses closer to the customers.   Next day and same day delivery will increasingly become the norm, especially in urban areas.   But to pull more business from bricks-and-mortar, Amazon warehouses will become a little big more like big box stores: nearer and more numerous.

Those warehouses indisputably are a physical nexus.  A taxable physical nexus.  In other words, getting closer to the customers means . . . paying sales tax in more states.  

If you have to pay tax anyway, shouldn't everyone else have to, as well? An argument that Amazon saw as unreasonable five years ago, when it came from bricks and mortar stores, comes to seem eminently sensible when it's you fighting off competition from smaller shops.  Amazon has reportedly poured millions into lobbying for this bill.  Small wonder it's poised to pass the Senate; smaller etailers don't have nearly the lobbying muscle, and they certainly don't have a chorus of governors urging their Senators to the state government out in these troubling fiscal times.

For all the complaints, this is not actually going to raise that much money.  Supporters of the bill claim that it will raise about $23 billion a year; opponents say it's more like $3 billion.  But even the higher number is about 0.1% of total state and local spending for 2012.  Internet retailing seems like a huge deal to folks in the media, who are much more likely than average to order a huge fraction of their purchases online. The overwhelming majority of taxable sales are local, however, and will be for the foreseeable future.  We spend most of our annual budget on groceries and restaurant meals and movie tickets and similar things that can't really be shipped.

So the interesting story here is not the budget question, but the business question: what does this tell us about the future of the marketplace?  The answer is that it's going to be big: Amazon, not eBay sellers.  The jewelers and other small retailers who wrote to me complaining that they couldn't compete unless Amazon was forced to charge sales tax are going to be sorely disappionted; they'll never be cost competitive with Amazon no matter what they do.   The internet sales tax isn't going to level the playing field between Amazon and local retailers.  It's just going to move Amazon closer to the end zone.

Cyberthieves Steal $45M

You really can find anything on the Internet these days. A group of cyberthieves pulled off two precision operations in February and made off with more than $45 million from thousands of ATMs in just a matter of hours, according to an indictment that was unsealed by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Thursday. The thieves, who were located in over a dozen countries, pulled off the heist with “surgical precision,” according to The New York Times, and made 36,000 transactions in just 10 hours. The organization’s suspected ringleader, a 23-year-old named Alberto Lajud-Peña, was found dead on April 27 in the Dominican Republic. Seven other people, all American citizens, have been charged with conspiracy to commit “access device fraud.”

Google CEO Larry Page

Google CEO Larry Page said he's 'sad' that rivals have taken a zero sum approach to Web technologies. (Jonathan Hall/Forbes)

Google CEO Larry Page made a surprise appearance at the company’s I/O development summit and called on rivals including Microsoft and Oracle to end to the “negativity” he believes has hampered progress with the Web.
“I think we’re all here because we share a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to improve people’s lives and the world,” Page said to the more than 6,000 developers gathered in San Francisco for the company’s three-day technology fest.
“Despite the faster change we have in the industry, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities that we have,” Page said.  “And some of that I think is due to the negativity. Every story I read about Google, it’s kind of us versus some other company, or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum. There’s a lot of opportunity out there.”
Page spoke for about 10 minutes to share his thoughts about technology in general and some of the innovations that Google is working on specifically – including a new version of its popular Google Maps unveiled today — before fielding questions from the audience for about 30 minutes. His appearance was a surprise because he hasn’t appeared in public in a year. Yesterday, he said that was due to a rare problem with his vocal cords that required surgery. In a Google+ posting, Page talked about his voice issue and said that they won’t interfere with his ability to do his job. Google co-founder Sergey Brin told him “I’m probably a better CEO because I choose my words more carefully.”


At least some of those words today were directed at his rivals, with Page calling out Microsoft and Oracle when asked about how he views progress in Web technologies and open standards.
“We’re really excited about the web obviously being birthed from it as a company, and we’ve invested a lot personally in the open standards behind all that,” Page said. “I’ve personally been quite sad at the industry’s behavior around all these things. If you just take something as simple as instant messaging, we’ve kind of had an offer forever that will interoperate on instant messaging. I think just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us but not doing the reverse, which is really sad, right? That’s not the way to make progress. You need to actually have interoperation not just people milking off one company for their own benefit. Google has always stood for that. I’ve been sad that the industry hasn’t been able to advance those things generally because of a focus on negativity and on zero sum games.”
“I’m sad that the Web is probably not advancing as fast as we should be,” he added. “We struggle with people like Microsoft.”
As for Oracle, Page, responding to acrimony and a long-running court battle between the companies over Google’s use of Oracle’s Java technology in the Android mobile operating system, Page said Oracle had rebuffed its efforts to make peace. “We’d like to have a cooperative relationship with them but it doesn’t seem possible. Money seems more important to them,” Page said, before adding that the companies would work through their problems.
Google executives used the 3.5-hour keynote event today to announce new features in the Android mobile operating system and Chrome desktop operating system and browser. Daniel Graf, a director of Google Maps, took a not-so-subtle crack at mobile rival Apple when he announced new features and described Google’s map application  as simple, sleek and “let’s not forget, accurate.” Apple, which unveiled a rival Maps App in September, had to apologize to iPhone users after they complained about numerous inaccuracies in the maps information.
Google also used the opening of the three-day event to announce a new subscription based music service called Google Play Music All Access, updates to its Google Play store, Google Cloud Messaging Service, and Google+ social networking service, and a new mobile app of its Hangouts video conferencing technology that will run on Android and Apple iOS-based smartphones and tablets. Next month, it will it sell a version of Samsung’s new Galaxy S smartphone that features the interface from the Google Nexus tablet for $649.
And of course, it also announced numerous new features and tools for developers, including help finding translation services for their apps and tools that allow developers to better track the revenue earned from apps distributed through the Google Play store. There was also a lot of talk about advancements in Google’s voice recognition technology, which powers its Google Now notification service and new conversational voice technology that will power its desktop search service in the future.
As always, Google also announced a product giveaway to attendees: a Google Chromebook Pixel notebook, which has a retail value of $1,200.
There were brief mentions of Google Glass, the smart eyewear it introduced with much fanfare at last year’s I/O, but no new news about the device.  When asked by a conference goer if Google would continue to create more devices like Glass, Page said Brin is working on exploring new uses beyond Glass and the driverless cars the company already has in development.
“Technology  should do the hard work so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life,” Page said.
Below is a play-by-play of the opening keynote.

DCIM market will grow from its current value of $450m to $1.7bn by 2016.

Datacentre service provider Digital Realty Trust has become the latest company to launch a datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) service.
The tool called EnVision is designed to help datacentre managers have an increased visibility into their datacentre operations and view and analyse data in a manner that is actionable, the company said. It will also provide tailored reporting and access to historical data which supports enterprises’ future IT planning and energy efficiency.

Datacentre infrastructure management is the convergence of IT and datacentre facilities functions within an organisation. It brings together stand-alone functions such as datacentre design, asset discovery and management, capacity planning and energy management. In some cases, it even encompasses certain systems management functions.
DCIM tools provide a holistic view of the whole IT infrastructure ranging from the rack or cabinet level to the cooling infrastructure to the building’s energy utilisation and help datacentre managers identify energy and resource waste and fix them.
According to analyst Gartner, the DCIM market will grow from its current value of $450m to $1.7bn by 2016.
“DCIM tools provide insights and improve performance throughout the data center, including data center assets and physical infrastructure. They enable the monitoring and collection of low-level infrastructure data to enable intelligent analysis,” said Gartner analyst David Cappuccio in a DCIM report from June 2012.
DCIM, which had no market penetration until 2009, is said to be a hot area of investment for datacentre suppliers as users increase their focus on datacentre energy efficiency and cost savings, according to datacentre expert Clive Longbottom.
Earlier this year, Siemens launched its first DCIM tool called Datacenter Clarity LC as it aimed to spread its focus into a broader datacentre arena.
Another IT provider IBM has also combined its IT service management (ITSM) software with Emerson Network Power’s Trellis platform to provide users with improved datacentre energy efficiency. As part of the collaboration, IBM will resell Trellis as its DCIM tool.
Other main players in the segment include Modius, nlyte Software (formerly GDCM) and Romonet. There are also a host of smaller, more niche software suppliers.
“Up until now, data has been collected, but it has not necessarily been easily accessed or arranged in an intuitive manner that is helpful to a datacentre operator,” said David Schirmacher, senior vice-president of portfolio operations at Digital Realty.
Digital Realty will roll out EnVision across its global datacentre portfolio, which includes 122 properties, in the next 18 months.

Domino’s Pizza plans to move web services to the cloud

After using open source cloud services for testing and development applications, the IT team at Domino’s Pizza is now looking to move other critical workloads, such as web services, to the cloud infrastructure.
The UK pizza delivery chain has been using Rackspace’s infrastructure as a service  and platform as a service  products for its testing and development environments for the best part of a year.

“Cloud is an important technology, but we wanted to build our experience and understanding of it in a low-risk way,” Domino's Pizza IT director Colin Rees (pictured) told Computer Weekly.
The IT team chose testing applications because they are not front facing and the development team needs to spin out very heavy workloads. “It was a good way to test cloud computing technology, its flexibility and scalability,” he said.
And the IT team is seeing cloud computing benefits such as on-demand capacity and cost savings.
The bulk of the pizza chain’s business takes place during weekend dinnertimes and Tuesdays when its popular “Two for Tuesday” promotional offer takes place.
To cater to the high demand for a few hours in the evenings, the IT team has to provision for the peak performance workloads at all times, even when it is not used. This leads to an under-utilisation of its infrastructure and high costs.

We expect to see some pretty substantial savings by using more cloud services Colin Rees, Domino's Pizza

“Having seen the clear benefits of cloud computing in testing and development, we have now slowly started the process of thinking how to move web services to the cloud infrastructure,” said Rees.
“We have seen some big improvements in reliability and we expect to see some pretty substantial savings by using more cloud services.”
His cloud strategy is clear – move top 10% of applications and workloads to the cloud, get comfortable, build up experience and then move some more.
“Cloud gives us flexibility and cost savings and I can’t see why we cannot move as much as 80% of our total workloads to the cloud, including business-critical apps and mobile workloads,” he said. “But that is going to be a slow journey and a step-by-step transition.”
The pizza delivery chain selected Rackspace’s cloud infrastructure because open source cloud will allow it to migrate workloads more easily than being locked in to a supplier. plus it was already using Rackspace for outsourcing and datacentre management services. “We did not want a separate vendor for cloud and a separate vendor for our in-house corporate infrastructure,” said Rees.

Installation of JBPM v6 Beta 2

JBoss Jbpm has launch new jbpm 6.0.0 beta2 version for Business Process Management.
It’s come with very new and useful components for BPM.

CLICK THE LINK BELOW to read more

http://www.attuneinfocom.com/installation-of-jbpm-v6-beta2

Mule Studio Online Training

Mule Online Training

IPC Portlet Tuturial

IPC Portlet in Liferay 6.1.1 ga2 


IPC is made easy with JSR-286 to share the data between two portlets. Using IPC mechanisms, we can share the data from ACTION to VIEW phase and VIEW-VIEW Phase.



http://www.attuneinfocom.com/how-create-ipc-portlet-liferay-611-ga2-0

Mule ESB Cook Book

Mule ESB Tutorial Book

Mule ESB Cookbook Written By: Dr. Zakir Laliwala, Abdul Samad, Azaz Desai & Uchit Vyas


http://www.packtpub.com/muleesb-to-build-enterprise-solutions-cookbook/book

Big seats

The world's Big and comfortable seats



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Be a team player but focus on your job.
Take risks but don´t fail.
Think out of the box but follow procedure.
Tell me the truth but don´t bring me problems.
Value employees but fire average performers
Help customers but spend less time with them.
Work more hours but mind your home life.


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Word of mouth

Word of mouth advertising is Still Most Trusted for all business, as each happy customer can tlak of new ones your way. And Word of mouth one of the most credible forms of advertising because a person puts their reputation on the line every time they make a recommendation and that person has nothing to gain but the appreciation of those who are listening. 

CCTV camera captures woman : thieves

CCTV camera captures a woman during the act as she articles from a store by hiding them under her clothes. Surprisingly, the woman drove to the store with an accomplice, in a sedan.

http://www.ndtv.com/video/special/caught-on-camera-meet-these-high-profile-thieves-871/272734

Experience a new May 2013

LED monitors from LG have the power to light up whatever you’re watching. Boasting elegant sophistication, awe-inspiring designs and your choice of features, you’ll take computing to the next level with an LG LED monitor.



Experience a new May 2013 Product dimension in 3D gaming and enjoy your favorite 2D content converted to 3D right in the comfort of your own home.

Online Live Mule ESB Training

Online Live Mule ESB Training

We are starting a new batch on Liferay, Mule ESB, Cloud Computing, Activiti BPM, Continuous Delivery, JBoss, Spring and Alfresco this week end. We provide online training & Self Spaced on Open Source technologies.