Vittorio Viarengo

Enterprise application integration, now the centerpiece of corporate IT strategy, remains unacceptably high in cost and effort for one reason. Today's typical IT organization has separate environments for application development and integration. BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 bridges this gap - converging application development and integration technologies into a unified platform. It leverages the BEA WebLogic Server as the underlying deployment environment, uses Web services to integrate distributed systems inside and outside the organization, and utilizes BEA WebLogic Workshop to simplify services-oriented development of applications (SODA). SODA requires IT staffs to design for application integration while the applications are being built, minimizing the burden of after-the fact integration. According to Gartner, SODA has the potential to reduce integration cos... (more)

Web Services' Impact on Business Process Management

Web services have been advertised as the one-size-fits-all solution for all sorts of integration problems. But like any other innovation in the software industry, Web services require a new generation of tools and infrastructure to help companies overcome the adoption hurdle and take full advantage of the business benefits this technology promises. In this article I take a closer look at Web services' impact on business process management (BPM) and identify the requirements for a new generation of BPM products that fully leverage Web services and address the resulting architectu... (more)