Arvind Jain's SOA BAM BI blog

How is SaaS Product Management different from traditional Product Management?

2010-02-22T22:27:00.001-08:00

As Enterprise Architects we are inclined to always question that how a particular technical architecture is going to benefit business strategy of my company. In the same thoughts I had a debate with my colleague that Product Management for a SaaS or Cloud based product is very different than a traditional approach to product management.

As SOA Architect I can see some of the challenges with reuse or creating global services. So here are some of the key differences between traditional product management vs SaaS product management, that I can think of. Please comment your thoughts or elaborate more.

In Saas product management you have to worry about all these additional things,

1) Data Management of customer data (Backup, recovery, export, migration)
2) Additional security around Access & Authorization
3) You earn your money every day and every moment, so it is not a traditional sell once and forget till the next new producty is available. If you fail customers may not and will not renew the subscription. So you have to develop SaaS with some stickiness feature like creating a website with lowest bounce rate and higher CTR (click through rate). so that there is highest probability of customers renewing.
4) Special considerations for On Demand / Multi Tenacy of the product / solution.
5) Much higer emphasis on Disaster Recovery, Peak Load and High Availablity.
6) One size does not fit all, so how would you provide innovation in cloud? How to empower customers in cloud so that they can maintain their cuttting edge by intelligent customizations.

I am thinking there will be additional issues like Multi Tenant Pricing that will be of concern (based on usage pattern, product differentiation etc.) so please comment your thoughts or elaborate more if you can.

MIT South Asian Alumni Association - MBA Panel Discussion

2010-02-08T23:42:00.001-08:00

MIT South Asian Alumni Association had invited me to a panel discussion at the Stanford University campus to share my MBA experience and guide future business school applicants. It was a good debate and most importantly I belive the assosciation is doing a great service to public. More details can be found here

http://alumweb.mit.edu/upload/AS/MBA_event_flyer_26414.pdf

Some very interesting Web 2.0 Links that can help in Smart Marketing & positioning

2010-01-24T15:53:00.001-08:00

This page contains links to some very interesting websites that I used as part of my MBA course on strategic uses of information technology. Anyone interested in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) must pay attention to these tools:

LINKS

Google Trends - find temporal trends in search word usage on the internet
Google Insights for Search - estimate relative importance of search terms with trends by geographical regions
Google Analytics - web analytics solution that gives insight into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness
Quantcast - monitor website traffic and effectiveness of marketing communications to customers. This give Demographics info of Visitors. You can also use Microsoft AdCenterLabs to analyze demographics.
Hitwise - ISP data, can be used to analyze how people get to, spend time in and depart from websites, large sample size
Alexa - web traffic metrics based on voluntary anonymous tracking of people who have signed up for free, large sample size
Comscore - web traffic metrics based on voluntary tracking of people who have signed up for a fee, gives much more detailed information but sample size is small
CrazyEgg - Click density analysis, find out where people are clicking on your webpage (is your design driving people to the right place?)

When you use Google AdWords be sure to use Ad Preview Tool at

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool?hl=en_US

Landmark achievement for my team - Cisco announced as overall winner for SOA implementation award by CIO magazine and SOA Consortium.

2009-11-02T18:13:00.000-08:00

Landmark achievement for my team - Cisco announced as overall winner for SOA implementation award by CIO magazine and SOA Consortium.

Cisco SOA Team Wins SOA Consortium / CIO Magazine Award

Cisco has been selected as the overall winner of the 2009 CIO Magazine “SOA Case Study Competition“ organized by the SOA Consortium. Please see detailed news article here.

Cisco was recognized by industry experts for its SOA initiatives, platform and implementation successes.
The SOA Case Study Competition highlights business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. The contest was open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies that have successfully delivered business or mission value using an SOA approach.

CIO Magazine, launched in 1987, produces award-winning content and community resources for information technology executives. The SOA Consortium is a group of renowned industry experts and practitioners, who through the years honor companies for outstanding achievement with this award.

If you are interested in the case study then please contact me offline at arjain@cisco.com

How to configure Standalone Fuego BEA Aqualogic Oracle BPM Studio to work with Secure Web Services?

2009-01-26T16:00:00.001-08:00

While evaluating BEA BPM Studio I had to struggle a bit with how to configure Standalone Fuego BEA Aqualogic Oracle BPM Studio .... I am trying to give credit to all companies here :) to work with Secure Web Services?

Now I have secured web services orchestrated and also using encryption in my BPM Processes. Here is the meat of the matter ...

In order to communicate with secured webservices using SSL encryption (those with WSDL end point starting as https:// ) you need to have certificates from those servers installed in your keystore.

For BPM Standalone these are the steps. And before you begin set JAVA_HOME to C:\OraBPMStudioHome\eclipse\jre if you have not done so already.

1. Download the .cer file from server. (One way is you can use IE browser to get that file and export it from browser to a local directory)

2. Put this file in %JAVA_HOME%\jre\lib\security. You can put it anywhere you want.

3. Run the following command at a command prompt:

C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_02\bin>keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias <CERT ALIAS NAME> -keystore ..\lib\security\cacerts -file ..\lib\security\gd_<cert file name>.cer

4. You will be prompted for a password. If you have not changed the password, it will be "changeit".

5. You will then get the following message if all is successful - "Certificate was added to keystore".

6. Restart Tomcat (inbuilt server in BPM Studio).

This should solve your problem.

Pls note that if you have not configured your keyStore then first do so. you will find this document handy to do so.

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/ssl-howto.html#Edit%20the%20Tomcat%20Configuration%20File

Quick tip: To see a list of keys in keystore

%JAVA_HOME%\bin\keytool -list -keystore ..\lib\security\cacerts

Arvind

Switched from Oracle BEA BPM Enterprise Version (on Weblogic) to the Standalone Version for Evaluation Purposes.

2008-12-03T17:03:00.001-08:00

Last week was a very short week during which I tried to install an Enterprise BEA BPM on Weblogic. There were a lot of configurations needed for Enterprise WebLogic Edition (Directory Server, Database, Deployment within the WebLogic JVM etc). I have listed the steps below.

It was taking too much time and was not very straightforward. I had to ensure that I have installed and configured the BEA WebLogic application server properly even before I could debug & play with the BPM engine.

At end of last Tuesday I made a call to switch to Enterprise Standalone but the efforts put in were good learning and useful for Standalone Installation as well. So for the purpose of proceeding with evaluation going forward I have shifted to Enterprise Standalone Version as my focus is BPM.

Some learnings or observations .... On the Oracle website they refer to downloading Oracle BPM Enterprise Administration Guide.pdf but in real scenario there was no such file name. I realized that it was same as Oracle BPM Admin Guide.pdf and the same goes for configuration guide as well. So will not get confused in future :)

Ok so with the ultimate aim being to Deploying and Publishing a New BPM Project I had to go through a series of steps. (For standalone I needed a much smaller set but the practice and drill was worthwhile learning in terms of infrastructure and operationalization of product.

The whole list of steps:

Creating Directory Service ( need to configure Directory Database Schema)
Creating a Process Execution Engine ( need to configure a separate Execution Engine Database Schema)
Configuring Weblogic Server
Creating Weblogic Server Domain
Create Oracle BPM Deploy User
Installing Oracle BPM Deployer
Creating JDBC Data Sources on BEA Weblogic Server
Creating JMS Server, Module & Resources
Configuring the Deployer and Deployment Targets
Enabling Clustering
Building and Deploying Application EAR Files
Deploying and Publishing a New BPM Project

As of now I have Standalone Enterprise BEA BPM configured with Directory (Oracle 10g DB). Engine DB configuration has some issues due to privileges. Make sure you have a friendly DBA to help out.

I am trying to come up with a set of use cases to test out different features.

More next week as I try to put together a list of features .. dully prioritized that I will like to test out.

If you have a challenge for me ...Bring it ON :)

Currently evaluating Oracle BPM 10gR3

2008-11-21T13:49:00.000-08:00

For the next one month I want to be critically evaluating Oracle BPM 10gR3.

Yes this is the new face and name of BEA Aqualogic BPM 6.5 , now with Oraclelization it is called as Oracle BPM 10gR3. Too early to make a comment.

My aim is to see how well Oracle has leveraged and integrated the BEA Aqua logic BPM products with its other products to offer a complete suite.

Getting started was easy .... Installed Oracle BPM Studio 10.3.0.0.0 from the link below. To get started

Please visit: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bpm/index.html

Here you will find download link – for initially getting your feet wet purposes, download of studio should suffice. Also, there is a tutorial and link to docs.

Installation was smooth, took around 60 Minutes. I referred to this site for the product documentation

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13154_01/bpm/docs65/index.html

One glitch ....

It took me 20 minutes to figure out why the "Launch Workspace" icon was disabled. Figured out that after designing the process I had unfortunately clicked on either "outline" or the "Log Pane" that exist below and clicking on those panes dynamical change the Menu and disable certain icons.

More later

Arvind

Finished Half Marathon of my pursuit of MBA

2008-11-15T23:25:00.001-08:00

I have been quite busy last few months with double MBAs. One one side
was the collaboartion, group study, projects, assignments and homeworks
for CMU MBA. The other side was my younger one growing up. That was
another MBA (Managing Baby Administration)

Things are finally getting easier as I am approaching the final year of
my MBA. This was a perfect time for me to learn about "Marketing
Management", "Financial Accounting", "Production & Operations
Management" , "Macroeconomics", "Corporate Finance" & "Marketing
Research". With the current ecomonic situation I feel that every day I
use my Business & Financial learnings to analyze situations.

Here is a recent picture from one of the CMU social networking events.

Arvind

Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business - Part Time MBA Program

2008-04-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

Quite many people have contacted me about the Carnegie Mellon part time MBA Program since I started the same in 2007. After having been through the experience for a year now, I can see direct applications of many of the Business School teachings to SOA world.

After all ... SOA & BPM is mostly about Business & IT alignment within an organization and in its partner eco system. So I though that it will be a good idea to write a summary about the CMU MBA program here in this blog.

Program Overview: I have been fortunate that the CMU MBA program is offered at Cisco Campus apart from their West Coast campus ( CMU West - http://west.cmu.edu/ ) in the Moffet Field (you can see signs on 101 north near Moffet Field exit). This is very handy at times when I need to hop out of meetings and join the class within minutes of getting out of office. It is first time at Cisco but the program itself was started in 1996.

It is delivered to corporate campuses in real-time via video-conferencing technologies and CISCO is leading the way with its TelePresence technology which is as real life as it can get. Others in the MBA class are from companies like Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, United Technologies, Oracle, Intel, Applied Materials, Pitney Browns etc.

Tepper MBA program is highly known in Financial & Operations Research area due to its stress on analytical approach to problem solving and decision making in complex and dynamic business environments. CMU Tepper is ranked 3rd in Wall Street Journal Rankings.

Part Time program has same admission/graduation criteria as it exists for Full/Part-time students in CMU Pittsburg Campus. More info at: http://www.tepper.cmu.edu

If you need more information please feel free to get in touch.

Arvind
arvindDOTjainATyahooDOTcom

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are my own and CISCO does not sponsor or endorse this program.

SOA on SOA !! - Bring the discipline of SOA to service development and creation in your organization.

2008-03-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

SOA on SOA!!

It was difficult to put the most appropriate words to my thoughts but what I am trying to bring out is that SOA implementation should not burden the service providers and consumers to go through the burden of learning all the latest standards, tools & technologies.

They should just worry about their business logic and there should be a framework which transparently takes care of making that business logic a service as in SOA world while adhering to their company's enterprise policies, processes and standards.

How to enable this? Enterprise architects should closely watch two upcoming standards - SCA & JBI.

JBI is JSR 208 and called as Java Business Integration. SCA is Service component architecture.

JBI is used by system integrators during physical deployment (customers and end users do not see this). It helps in management & interoperability of your SOA infrastructure.

SCA has a design and composition perspective. It is used by developers to annotate or put notes in their code to describe service and their dependencies.

The aim is to create a virtual container for hosting services. This way services can be plugged into ESB or into an existing Policy Manager. It will be independent of language and will help as a framework for exposing business logic as service.

The other significant benefits I see are
- Consistent deployment & management
- Location Transperancy (Virtualization)
- Policy Enforcement
- Consistent Security Model
- SOA does not means every developer needs to know about WSDL or WS-* or other standards. They need to know the core business logic.
- It might possibly help in transaction coordination.

So let us try to use our own methodology SOA to help in implementation & adoption of SOA.

Arvind

How to take Build vs Buy decision in case of Software Products?

2008-02-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

In the world of software development once in a while everyone reaches that crossroad where he needs to decide - Should we build that software or buy it? Build vs Buy !! Deal or No Deal !!

Here are suggestions that will help you. When making a Buy vs Build decision do the following:

Consider only the costs that are affected by your decision (example you may or may not decide to buy additionaly 24X7 support)
Include all Opportunity Costs (are you going to miss on some other core oppurtunity / project in your own industry)
Ignore Sunk Costs, these are costs that have already been incurred (example can be hardware cost as either version of bought or in house build software will require similar hardware)Calculate total costs of each option. Total cost = fixed (avoidable) costs + variable (avoidable) costs
Considering "Soft" or "Intangible" cost/benefits, for example future use of product or learning, team reputation or burden (in terms or learning or development), derivative products.

Other Important Hints/Viewpoints

A very important consideration is to look at the Marginal cost i.e. the cost for deploying an additional host (cpu) with the same software.
For coming up with oppurtunity cost - look at the nature of technology/product and its maturity level - analysis in the Short Run and in the Long Run
Look at the service/product provider and its industry - will you be price taker or price chooser? How much can you negotiate? What are hidden benefits/costs of partnership?
Evaluate options using the net present value (NPV) & internal rate of return (IRR) approach
A little known fact is about the Basic Accounting ... Is it favourable for company's accounting? - This is very important as software bought is a depreciable asset for organization while software built will be treated as an ongoing expense without any balance sheet asset created out of it.

Hope you have some food for thought and solid points to make your case in your next board/council meeting.

Arvind

Does the best technology & architecture guarantee a successful SOA or BPM?

2008-02-24T22:50:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered that given best technology & architecture ...Are you guarantee a successful SOA or BPM project?

Answer is a simple and a big NO.

There is much more to a successful SOA or BPM implementation & adoption then just choosing the right tools and technology and architecting the finest blueprints. The best and brightest team of IT architects and engineers definitely help to do the toughest of design & implementation projects .... but that is just half the task.

Embracing SOA or BPM or for that matter any new initiative like WEB 2.0 and Collaboration is a major change for the organization. By nature changes are difficult as people see change with a grain of salt and skepticism.

Hence the Architecture Community has an additional and significant responsibility to be the "Change Agents" in the organization. They need to understand basic human nature & group behavior in order to be successful in their SOA or BPM initiative. They need to understand that shift in attitude seldom comes at once. The rate at which different groups, divisions or individuals will adopt these changes will vary by individual, or the type of change or the organizational context.

They need to identify these stages of change and simultaneously work on those while doing their core IT or Business job.

Understand that it is not sufficient for just you to have adopted this change. You have to guide and lead the larger community through the various stages of change, namely

1) Awareness

2) Interest (people develop curiosity)

3) Trail (skepticism is overcome)

4) Adoption

I will further share my experience about managing change during these various stages in some later blog or if there is an interest in the community.

Arvind

Top 10 areas to address before taking Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.3 to a Production Implementation

2007-07-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a summary of the article I am writing on How to adopt BPEL PM in a Production Environment. This is based on 10.1.3 release of BPEL PM. If you need specific details then please drop me a line.

Top 10 areas to address before taking Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.3 to a Production Implementation
Arvind Jain
5th July 2007

1) Version Management (Design Time)
When we are choosing a Source Safe System or Version Control system for Business Processes the consideration are quite different than choosing a Source Safe System or Version Control system for Java, C++ code components. The average user / designer of Business processes is not CODE savvy, they cannot be expected to manually merge code (*.bpel files or *.wsdl files for example). BPEL PM lacks in Design time version management of Business Processes using the jDeveloper IDE. What is needed is a Process Based Development and Merge environment. We need Visibility into Process Repository. So the requirements are different from that of a Component based repository. Consider using a good BPMN / BPA tool.

2) Version Governance (Run Time)
While BPEL PM can maintain version number for deployed BPEL processes, it is still left to an administrator or a Business Analyst to decide which process version will be active at a given point in time and what will be the naming, versioning standard. Since every deployed BPEL Process is a service, so it becomes critical to apply SOA governance methodology to control various deployed and running BPEL Processes.

3) SOAP over JMS (over SSL)
Most of the big corporation and multinationals have policies which restrict use of HTTP traffic from outside world to inside intranet. Moreover they have policies which require the use of a Messaging Layer or an ESB as a Service Intermediatory for persistence, logging, security and compliance reasons. BPEL PM support for bi directional SSL enabled JMS communication is not out of box. It needs to be tried and tested out within your organization and workarounds needs to be implemented.

4) Authentication & Authorization - Integration with LDAP / Active Directory
SOA governance requires authentication and authorization for service access based on a corporate repository and roles defined within them. This is also critical for BPEL Human Workflow (HWF). Make sure to do a small Pilot / POC for integration with your corporate identity repository before taking BPEL PM to production.

5) Integration with Rules Engine
BPEL should be used for Orchestration only and not for coding programming logic or hard coded rules. Hence it is important to have a separate Rules Engine. Many rules engine available in Market support Java facts and BPEL Engine Being a Java Engine should integrate out of the Box with these. But some rules engine have the limitation that they can take only XML facts, so it is an overhead to go from Java to XML so as to use XML facts and then marshal back to Java. So make sure that you have sorted out Integration with Rules Engine prior to BPEL production implementation.

6) Implementation Architecture
BPEL processes and projects can and will expand to occupy all available resources within your organization. These business processes are pretty visible processes within a company and have strict SLAs to meet. Make sure you have a proven and tested reference architecture for Clustering, High Availability and Disaster recovery. There has to be a provisioning process, deployment process and Process Life cycle governance methodology in place before you can fire up all engines in a production environment.

7) Throughput Consideration
BPEL PM by nature is an interpretation engine and hence there is a performance hit when running long running processes and doing heavy transformations. Plan on doing some stress and load testing on the servers running your Business Processes to get a Ball Park estimate of what is the end to end processing time and how much load can be taken by the BPEL server. Specifically do a capacity planning based on results from these pilot load and stress tests.

8) Design of BPEL Process (Payload Size, BPEL Variables - Pass by Reference or by Value)
Designing a Business Process is more of an art than a science and the same holds for BPEL Business Processes. It is important to understand what will be best practices in your organization in terms of Payload size and length of various Processes and how they are orchestrated. Are you passing across big XML payloads which can be avoided by changing the process and using a technique called as passing by reference? Will that also make your process more efficient and create true Business Services from these processes? Give a consideration to these and spend some white boarding sessions with Business and IT Analysts before creating a BPEL process.

9) Schema Consideration - Canonical Data Model & Minimal Transformations
The most cost and resource intensive step in any Integration or Process Orchestration scenario is Transformations. Especially in an orchestration engine like BPEL PM the XML payload goes through multiple massaging steps. If you can design your process flow in such a way that there is minimal of these steps then it will improve the performance of Business Process end 2 end. Also it is a best practice to have an enterprise wide canonical data model derived from some industry wide standard like OASIS, Rosettanet, ebXML etc

10) Administration - Multiple BPEL Console, Central HWF Server, Customized UI or use existing UI?
BPEL PM is easy to use and makes process orchestration almost a zero coding activity. Also it is pretty easy to learn and hence there is suddenly a bunch of BPEL processes deployed and a bunch of BPEL developers in enterprise once the floodgates are opened.

It is very critical for an enterprise scale deployment to figure out ways to Provision BPEL Server Instances and to give selective access to BPEL Console to relevant developers. BPEL console is a powerful tool and there is not much of a role based security functionality in that except for the concept of domains. Options are to create your own Administration / Console UI using the BPEL Server API’s or to have a BPEL Administrator take care of such requests.

BPEL PM comes with a built in Human Workflow Server (HWF) but in an enterprise you might want to have a centralized HWF server. All these need to be given though to before putting BPEL PM into a production environment.

How to OBFUSCATE passwords and ENCRYPT sensitive fields in BPEL PM?

2007-07-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

Here is a small tip on security while using Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

Many a times you have to supply password information and other sensitive information in your BPEL PM project files (*.bpel, *.xml, *.wsdl). How do you ensure that these are not visible as clear text to others who do not have access to source codes? Here is a quick tip on using the XML tag <encryption="encrypt">.

Where can this be used?

- to obfuscate password info while accessing a partnerlink that refers to a WebService secured by Basic Authentication ... login/password.

Example:

Suppose you have a partnerlink definition defined with LOGIN PASSWORD info as shown below. You want to obfuscate the password i.e. You do not want to see clear text "cco-pass"

(sample)
<partnerLinkBinding name="PartnerProfileService">
<property name="wsdlLocation">PartnerProfileWSRef.wsdl</property>
<property name="basicUsername">cco-userid</property>
<property name="basicPassword">cco-pass</property>
<propertyname="basicHeaders">credentials</property>
</partnerLinkBinding>

Add the property encryption="encrypt" for sensitive fields, this will cause the value to be encrypted at deployment. So the new XML will look like

(sample)
<partnerLinkBinding name="PartnerProfileService">
<property name="wsdlLocation">PartnerProfileWSRef.wsdl</property>
<property name="basicUsername">cco-userid</property>
<property name="basicPassword" encryption="encrypt">cco-pass</property>
<property name="basicHeaders">credentials</property>
</partnerLinkBinding>

Then deploy your process and the password will be encrypted.
Have fun encrypting things !!

2006-10-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

How to enable EM after installation in Oracle Application Server?

I was asked this by a customer who just installed Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.1. There are a few ways (listed below) to accompolish this. Option 1) & 2) below will help you start EM as a one time thing while option 3) will help you save that as a configuration setting everytime you start SOA suite.

1. $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl startproc application=ascontrol

2. java -jar $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/admin_client.jar deployer:oc4j:opmn://:/ oc4jadmin -start ascontrol

3. Edit $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee//config/server.xml and set the ascontrol application entry to start=true.

Ps: If you see that server.xml file is not available in the install, then there is a problem, either you are in wrong directory or the installation itself is corrupt.

HTH,

Arvind

2006-07-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this blog is to share knowledge and experience about SOA, BAM, BPEL & BI technologies with participants around the world. The intended audience include IT Manager, Architects, Business Analyst & Developers or anyone who practices implementing these in real world scenarios.

Let me know if you have an unanswered question, or a business problem regarding implementation of these technologies. I will try my best to find an answer, example or a use case or just point you to the right direction where you can get help.

Arvind

Arvind Jain
Principal Solutions Architect
OracleAS Solution Architects Team - "The A-Team"
Redwood Shores, CA
Email: arvind.jain@oracle.com