Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Virtualization has quickly become a staple new concept for enterprise IT. At SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24, we had exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT. The two content-packed days emphasized value with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of virtualization.

This open beta program includes two new Quality Management products and three enhanced versions of Rational products that you may already know: New IBM Rational Quality Manager v8.0, New IBM Rational Test Lab Manager v8.0, Enhanced IBM Rational Performance Tester v8.0, Enhanced IBM Rational Functional Tester v8.0 and Enhanced IBM Rational Service Tester for SOA Quality v8.0.

This Rational Quality Management ROI calculator is intended to give you an idea of what return you can garner from implementing our solutions. Our quality management solutions offer tools that help you develop a continuous process, powered by automation to govern software delivery. This calculator offers ROI information for functional test automation. The ROI in this calculator is based on labor savings.

As the number of XML files in enterprise organizations significantly increases, architects, application developers, and data integration specialists must deal simultaneously with the growing number of XML formatted messages on the network as well as their rapidly expanding file sizes. While XML has become the 'de facto' standard for transferring data from one step to the next in a business process or between applications, there are more and more occasions when files are easily exceeding 50-100MB in size, causing performance slow downs and memory overloads.

A SOA Gateway is a core infrastructure component of a SOA with the ability to integrate XML/SOAP-based services securely. Typically deployed as a hardware appliance, a SOA Gateway seamlessly controls access to services, protects information through data-level encryption, ensures the integrity of a message through signatures, and controls information flow. This article covers SOA Gateway deployment best practices, benefits and requirements with a focus on service virtualization, message privacy and integrity, and message control and auditing.

SOA brings challenges for every part of the IT organization, and the IT quality organization is no exception. SOA requires quality management across all types of testing--functional, performance, security and compliance. IT quality managers can develop a successful SOA quality program by finding the right strategy, implementing the right processes and selecting the right tools.

Few other innovations in IT offer the transformative potential of SOA. SOA is centered around a transformation of your enterprise IT architecture into a set of services that can be shared and reused across application development initiatives. The successful deployment of services requires the ability to manage the quality of these services so you can increase the use of IT resources and reuse services across multiple applications to enhance business agility.

Today, SOA is a mainstream IT initiative that ranks among the top priorities of CIOs. SOA dramatically improves the flexibility and adaptability of organizations by accelerating the time to market for new applications and processes. This paper summarizes the business benefits of adopting SOA, describes the obstacles that must be overcome and outlines the business technology optimization (BTO) approach that HP uses to optimize the business outcome of SOA.

The technologies used by IT to create SOAs are maturing. They are found to be robust and reliable. SOA governance provides a framework for making and applying the decisions that determine how the SOA will be designed, developed and operated. Work with real enterprises deploying SOAs to solve real business problems has led to the development of a set of best practices spanning SOA. This paper presents the eight best practices for SOA governance.

Managing SOA services is usually done by a specific project team initially. However, in the long run, SOA must be managed in production by IT operations to take advantage of trusted operational processes. This paper describes an approach to SOA management that integrates SOA into the fabric of IT by addressing the unique aspects of SOA management and balances the needs of the initial SOA project team with the needs of the enterprise.

CIO's face a common battle to balance the warring requirements of providing critical business value with maximum efficiency and cost savings. As they look to simplify their IT infrastructure, they must consider where it makes sense to draw a line in the sand and say 'Here's what my vendor ERP can do, and here's what we need performance management to do - the two are not the same, and we must have the right solution for each one.'

SOA has become a strategic imperative for organizations today. Without a SOA strategy, you risk being outpaced and outperformed by competitors who are better equipped to serve customers, seize opportunities and respond to change. This paper highlights the concept of SOA governance and provides a framework for blending the flexibility of a SOA with the control, consistency and predictability of traditional IT architecture.

SOA enables IT to increase agility and to lower costs. However, because of the added complexity, you need to manage SOA services and applications built with SOA to ensure their performance and availability meets the needs of the business. This white paper provides an overview of the specific challenges involved - including service discovery, monitoring, root cause analysis and service level management- and offers potential solutions to address them.

Improving business performance is a goal that cannot be realized without mutual cooperation and alignment between business and IT. In collaboration, IT focuses on architecture, system administration, scalability and performance, security and infrastructure, while business evaluates the practical usability and capabilities of tools being considered and how effectively they can be integrated into organizational and business processes. All parties must ensure that both technical requirements and the business needs are well defined, harmonized and prioritized. Leaving everything to one party or the other can be a sure path to failure.

Effectiveness in achieving goals and objectives has replaced efficiency as the most impactful business priority. Delay will impact performance; every day in which you aren't able to respond to a market or competitive challenge is a day lost. Your business depends on achieving planned results. To do that, management must be empowered and operational visibility improved.

Cost cutting is a common demand that is levied on technology organizations. Consequently, each new paradigm within the industry is pitched by some as a cost-cutting strategy. The trouble is that many enterprises attempt some grand enterprise-wide deployment rather than incrementally growing their SOA over time and incorporating lessons learned along the way.

Yesterday we read the news of B-hive's acquisition by VMware. Also this week Microsoft closed the Kidaro acquisition, which had been announced earlier in the year. Both of these companies participated in SYS-CON's second international Virtualization Conference & Expo last November in San Francisco. This event was also the last conference BEA Systems sponsored, days before their Oracle acquisition news hit the press. PlateSpin is one of the Gold Sponsors of the upcoming 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City. Novell bought the company before this event has even taken place. In the past six months, four out of nine Virtualization Conference sponsors were acquired.

Microsoft added this week workflow capabilities to BizTalk Services, the company's platform-in-the-cloud project for SOA and business process management.

Sonoa Systems announced that Sterling Infosystems has selected its ServiceNet solution to more effectively operate Sterling's SOA infrastructure and ensure enterprise-class security, manageability and performance of these customer-facing Web services.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

It looks like pretty soon all computing will be called cloud computing, just because the cloud is 'in.' Fortunately most computer savvy folks actually have a pretty good idea of what the term 'cloud computing' means: outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the Internet, etc. What is still confusing to many is how the different offerings compare from Amazon Web Services to Google App Engine and Force.com. I recently heard a characterization of three different levels of clouds which really helps put the various offerings into perspective.

Scott Guthrie isn't much bothered whether they're called 'Rich Internet Applications' or 'Rich Interactive Applications' - Microsoft, where Guthrie is Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Platform and therefore head of the Redmond team behind Silverlight 2, uses both. In a recent interview he says 'We use each kind of interchangeably. Mostly we just call them RIAs now.'

As the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA) evolves, it brings interesting challenges that should be addressed in order to drive its adoption and realize the benefits it has been promising. It took a while for many to understand that SOA is not purely a technology issue.

Apple got pared in after-hours trading Monday, dropping 18 bucks, close to 11%, apparently because of the weak guidance it issued for the current quarter and because it declared the state of Steve Jobs' health off-limits on a day when the New York Post revisited speculation that he's critically ill.

OpenSpan announced that it closed $13 million of C-round venture capital funding. The round was co-led by FTVentures and Globespan Capital Partners, and included re-investments from Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners and Imlay Investments. The funding will help OpenSpan accelerate its growth with strategic new hires, expanded operations, including international markets, and continued investments for building out the company's innovative client-side integration technology.

DataDirect and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation announced the availability of the DataDirect Data Integration Suite. The new offering combines DataDirect Technologies' existing XML-based technologies in one package with a single, simple installation. Software developers now have the combined power of the DataDirect XQuery, DataDirect XML Converters (Java and .NET) and Stylus Studio products to meet their immediate data transformation and aggregation needs.

Forum Systems announced it has partnered with Techlogix to bring SOA products to markets in United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Asia-Pacific. Techlogix will supply Forum Sentry with installation and architecture consulting services to its large customer base across Asia-Pacific and United Arab Emirates.

WSO2 announced that it has extended its support for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance through enhanced authentication. Version 1.5 of the WSO2 Identity Solution for strong Web authentication based on open standards and open source is now generally available and adds support for OpenID, a feature for decentralizing single sign-on. Additionally, WSO2 has joined the OpenID Foundation and is a founding member of the Information Card Foundation, which was launched June 23, 2008.

AmberPoint announced that it has joined the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, where it will work with SAP to provide best practices for integrating its service-oriented architecture (SOA) runtime governance solutions with SAP enterprise services. AmberPoint intends to work with the SAP Co-Innovation Lab team to demonstrate and extend its SOA runtime governance capabilities by highlighting new use cases and scenarios, as well as identifying and sharing best practices showing how AmberPoint's solutions complement SAP solutions.

IONA has announced that Chariot Solutions has become a FUSE Partner. Chariot Solutions, as a FUSE Partner, will resell IONA's FUSE family of Open Source services and solutions to address customers' enterprise Open Source requirements.

IONA announced that Chariot Solutions has become a FUSE Partner. Chariot Solutions, as a FUSE Partner, will resell IONA's FUSE family of Open Source services and solutions to address customers' enterprise Open Source requirements. As a FUSE Partner, Chariot Solutions' consulting customers will have access to IONA's services for its FUSE product family, featuring fully supported, enterprise releases of leading Apache Open Source projects including ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF and Camel.

Red Hat announced that InfoCamere, an organization responsible for managing the IT systems that connect and secure over 100 Italian Chambers of Commerce, relies on Red Hat and JBoss solutions for flexibility, reliability and ease of use for its mission-critical systems.

Esker announced that it has signed a USD$1M enterprise agreement to implement Esker DeliveryWare for a Fortune 50 electronics manufacturer, enabling the company to automate the delivery of sales order documents into its SAP system.

SAP announced the opening of a second SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Ohtemachi, Tokyo, Japan. Joining the co-innovation lab, located in Palo Alto, California, the addition further broadens efforts by SAP to work with software solution partners, technology partners, service partners and customers to accelerate the innovation and delivery of solutions designed to address industry-specific business issues for companies around the world.

This is a reference guide to what each of the major software vendors are doing in the SaaS space. I won't be sensational and predict the demise of any of these vendors. I think it's far too early to tell how the future will pan out. I can say subjectively that I am impressed with Larry Ellison's pioneering efforts in the space. I can also say that SAP is currently the media whipping boy in the space, with delays in their Business ByDesign program costing them credibility.

In order to discuss some of the issues surrounding The Cloud concept, I think it is important to place it in historical context. Looking at the Cloud's forerunners, and the problems they encountered, gives us the reference points to guide us through the challenges it needs to overcome before it is adopted.

Talk to any seasoned application developer who's about to embark on a new web application project and you can bet on the following: they have decided on or have narrowed down their choice on an application development framework. Talk to engineers and administrators that manage the online service of a SaaS or eCommerce business, and you see quite a different picture. Indeed, you'll even find a different set of assumptions.

A new global survey issued by Software AG suggests that enterprise adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has 'crossed the chasm'. Users also identified SOA governance as a key component of sustainable implementations with holistic, lifecycle approaches viewed as a core requirement. However, the overall maturity of their adoption was regarded as moderate with the state of their governance practices considered lacking.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.