Friday, January 25, 2008

BEA Participate 2008 - Social Computing, BPM, User Interaction, and more...

Hi,

If you need a reason to be in the US in May, or you are already here, read on... We are going to host our BEA Participate 2008 event in Chicago this year - I must say it is one of my favorite cities in the planet.

If you had a chance to come last year, you know this will be a great event. You will have the opportunity to connect with several people from BEA and more importantly several other customers and partners. You also get to see the latest in terms of product releases, roadmaps, and technology deep-dives.

This year we will have a nice twist added to it: "This year, BEA.Participate.08 will feature a unique experiment in social computing. Registered conference attendees will be provided an iPod Touch to interact on-the-fly with the conference agenda, session speakers and content, and each other." - find more information on the official site. This should be fun, maybe I will get an iPod Touch after all. ;-)

AquaLogic BPM Suite customers should plan to come talk to the product team, participate in the user's group meeting, and see great demos.

Cheers,

--alex



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Saturday, January 19, 2008

AquaLogic BPM Suite - Looking ahead...

Hi,

If you had a chance to come to our user conference, BEA World, you probably got a good idea of what is coming in the next release of AquaLogic BPM Suite - code name GATURRO. For those of you that did not have a chance to attend I hope to start sharing some of the new features here in this blog. I plan to post some updates from time to time until the product is released. So let's get started with some new things:

ESB: As you know AquaLogic BPM Suite (ALBPM) has one of the best, most seamless integrations with our AquaLogic Service Bus product (ALSB). We have been very pleased with how customers are using the two products together. Service Orchestration is a now a breeze - just click and go... For GATURRO we are planning to update the integration to work with the latest version of the bus, AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0. We will be using the latest transport technologies, as well as provide the same smooth integration to/from AquaLogic BPM Studio, ALBPM Enterprise Server, and the Service Bus server. I should be posting some screen shots as we finalize our next development mile stone. Folks that are big on SOA will really like what is coming in this area. :-)

Repository: Governance is big. We are working closely with the AquaLogic Enterprise Repository team to improve our product integration. How far we will be able to take it is still too early to tell, but we would like to make it as smooth as what we have done with the ALSB product. The main idea is to be able to participate in different Governance and Re-Use of Components type of use-cases. Having a good ESB and Repository integration are key elements of our SOA strategy. Since we have strong synergies already in place with ALSB, ALER is the next natural step.

Web Tier & Collaboration: For the folks using Portals you should be pretty happy. We are planning to update our integration with the AquaLogic Interaction Portal to work with the latest upcoming new version. For the customers using WebLogic Portal 10.x, we are planning to improve usability in the current integration, making it simpler. We are also planning to expand our Process Collaboration with support for some nice use-cases with AquaLogic Pages. The web tier is getting a lot of attention in this release. I should probably do a few postings on each of those items.

Studio: Since AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0, our Studio environment is built on top of the Eclipse Framework. For GATURRO we are exploring moving to the 3.3 version of Eclipse. We will be leveraging the latest improvements, as well as adding some of our own improvements. Usability is a big theme in this area. The WorkSpace is also getting some enhancements in both usability and infrastructure support. More to come here in future posts...

Infrastructure: I will need a long post on this one... Lots of improvements to talk about here. This should also cover improvements on different BPM related standards.

I hope to post more details and screen shots as we keep making progress. Finally, an Early Access Process (EAP) will be available soon for customers that are interested in providing feedback and taking an early look on the product. If you want to participate, please contact your BEA Account Rep and let them know, you can also ping me about it at: "alext [at] bea [dot] com".

Cheers,

--alex

Friday, January 4, 2008

BEA World China 2007 - Quick look at the event.

It has been a few weeks since BEA World China in Shanghai, but I just got around to download the pictures to my laptop... Sorry for the delay.

Below is the main auditorium we had available for the Keynote. This was the day before during the light and sound checks. The event brought in over 7000 people from all types of industries. Sarah has a nice description in her blog of the general feeling of the event.

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Next is the outside view of the Conference Center in the new Financial District in Shanghai. You could see from a distance that a BEA event was going to take place. I hope to learn a little more Chinese next time, over a billion good reasons to do so. :)

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Here is a shot with some members of our local team in China. After getting all the machines ready to go with the latest demos and the latest version of AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0.2, we just had to take a quick group picture. During the event we got so many people coming by with questions, we needed an army to keep up with the demand.

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From left to right Alex (me ALBPM PM), Robin (WLS Director), Mariano (ALBPM Architect), and Emilio (ALBPM CTO). We have customers running ALBPM on a variety of environments. Standalone without an Application Server. Running on WebSphere, in large deployments by the way. And of course on WebLogic Server, in large deployments as well.

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Next you can see the AquaLogic BPM booth completely booked solid... It was like this for the whole event... There was a good mix of customers, developers, and IT folks coming around. Business Process Optimization and Outsourcing were big themes during the discussions. A lot of interest on our latest release and its new features.

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There were people everywhere down to the very last minute. I think BEA should consider coming here twice a year... We also had several partners participating. Some of the largest US firms as well as large Chinese companies.

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Finally another view from the outside, this was the area around the conference. It feels like a vision from the future. Amazing brand new buildings, huge TV tower, in a city with over 18 million people.

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That is it folks. Happy 2008!

Cheers,

--alex





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