Anthony Gold

If you had to pick a single business benefit that service-oriented architecture (SOA) can provide, it is the ability to respond to change. Change occurs continually in a multitude of places that affect the enterprise: the market, the supply chain, strategic processes, regulations, and so forth. SOA can enable the creation of an agile environment that creates stability in the face of change because it restructures automated functions into reusable pieces that can be quickly reconfigured into new or modified processes. But an architectural approach alone will not create agility. Agility comes from having the right pieces from which agile processes can be assembled. Developing, refactoring, or acquiring the right services requires a deep understanding of your business. Over the past few decades, many models have evolved to push automation toward agility. Simple mainf... (more)

Open Source Solutions: Seek Value Beyond Cost

In the early days the sheer novelty of open source software being free had a certain allure. But actually using it meant dealing with myriad technical and support issues - more than enough to make the price tag of commercial enterprise software worthwhile. Fortunately, that's changed. The last few years have seen much of the open source software portfolio become mature enough not only to compete with commercial packages, but, increasingly, to exceed them in both functionality and reliability. This opens a new field of potential customer value and opportunity. But while the techni... (more)

SSO, Open Source and the 'Modern' Enterprise

Efforts to modernize enterprise infrastructure have never been more complex. While the need is certainly there on multiple fronts – competitive edge, cost savings and new business initiatives, to name just a few – new hurdles seem to pop up no matter where an IT administrator might look. That includes not just management issues such as cap/ex costs and user resistance, but also an increasing pancake stack of integration layers within and among applications. New-generation software tools, legacy development tools, back-end data resources, hardware infrastructure &ndash... (more)