26
APRIL, 2005
BEA
shows service-specific trend
At
the broad brush-stroke level of concepts, service-based infrastructures
are relatively easy to comprehend, but they are made up of a myriad array
of component elements, most of which provide only a small part of the
whole - and these are parts that are not always seemingly relevant. It
is fair to say that, as a new approach like service orientation starts
to develop, picking the elements that will be important to its make up
can be a bit hit and miss. Some, Like NetSuite, are marking the trail
towards the utility-delivered implementation that is the long-term goal
for just about every major player in the SOA space. Others, like Conformative,
are highlighting a trend in providing servers specifically targeted to
important applications tasks.
NetSuite is one of the vendors that are revisiting the old Application
Service Provider (ASP) business model that fizzed then failed a few years
ago. That failure was built on the early ASPs trying to be all things
to all men, and ending up as no things at all. NetSuite, along with others
such as Salesforce.com, revisited the idea in a narrower, application-specific
manner, the latter targeting CRM, and NetSuite business management. It
has subsequently added ERP and other related functionality to the suite,
which is available online and on demand on the company's servers.
This is, in a small way, the basis of the utility delivery model, and
the company has now added one more important component, that is marker
for where that utility model will need to go to be fully effective. It
has added an application development tool - AppBuilder - that has been
designed for use by systems administrators and solutions architects directly.
According to NetSuite CEO, Zach Nelson, AppBuilder grew out of a specific
need that the company had for additional resources within the system.
For example, they realised they needed a bug-tracking system as part of
the development environment. So they decided to develop the tools they
would need to build not just the bug tracker but any other additional
components that might be needed.
The toolset has now been made available to NetSuite users, where it can
be used to develop specific business management applications amongst the
company's target market of medium-sized businesses. It does also have
a side benefit, however, that might attract the interest of larger database
applications developers. As NetSuite is closely allied to Oracle, with
its offerings built on the Oracle database, the new AppBuilder can be
used as a low cost alternative development environment in which to prototype
Oracle database applications.
The important aspect here is that such a tool, particularly with a focus
on ease of use, is moving towards the level where the business manager
can contemplate undertaking the development process. And where the results
run on a utility-based service, this is exactly the type of development
environment that will be needed as service-based infrastructures take
hold.
What will also be needed are specialist servers such as that from Conformative.
Readers may remember this being mentioned last year, for it is a specialist
XML processor. This is an important function as processing XML messages
is both the lingua franca of service-based infrastructures and, because
of the processor overhead the technology demands, the biggest potential
bottleneck to the practical implementation of SOA technologies.
The company is now ready to start pilot testing the processor with several
large financial institutions (where fast XML processing is now crucial)
and the delay in the server's appearance has had a side benefit for users.
The system is hardware-based and built around a specially designed processor
chip which is, in effect, a Grid processor system on a single chip. The
original design was for a chip that would offer a 50x performance improvement
over software servers running on standard Intel-based hardware. A new
design, exploiting the faster technologies of a different semiconductor
'foundry', now means that a 200x performance improvement is available.
This system is, perhaps, the most extreme end of a trend that is now starting
to appear more commonly in software form at the moment. This is the application-specific
server, and both hardware and software variants are likely to form an
increasingly important element in the practical implementation of service-based
infrastructures in the future, as it allows architects to not only model
in functional `blocks' but also define and built actual infrastructures
in the same way.
www.netsuite.com
www.conformative.com
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