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My overview of SOA (service oriented architecture) governance

Feeling technical today? I did an exhaustive Q&A with ITBusinessEdge about SOA Governance and the role it plays in their enterprise. For those who don't already know, "SOA governance" is the set of policies and activities that help to manage an SOA environment.

A snippet of genius:

Typically, rules are not effective until there is a baseline established. This is the same for a kindergarten class or a loosely coupled IT environment. Consider, for example, what happens if you try to build a house without knowing what materials are available -- sure walls made of … Read more

Reminder: Open Source Events--OSBC (March 25-26, 2008) and MuleCon (April 1-2, 2008)

The fine folks at InfoWorld Events and MuleSource are offering Negative Approach readers discounts for their upcoming events.

OSBC-March 25-26, 2008, San Francisco Reg code for $200 discount: mulesource Registration https://webreg.events.infoworld.com/osbc

MuleCon-April 1-2, 2008, San Francisco http://www.mulecon.com Mention this blog and get $50 off the MuleCon registration - just email mulecon2008@mulesource.com or call 1-415-229-2065 to register.

Disclosure: I am an employee of MuleSource and speaker at OSBC.

Event on 3/20/2008: How to Pick Your Investors (breakfast, anyone?)

I am on a breakfast panel this Thursday in Menlo Park as part of Orrick's complimentary TOTAL ACCESS program focused on the needs of the start-up and venture capital communities.

Topics Include: What Matters? Plan Ahead Get References Understand the Relative Role Your Investor Has in the Partnership

Panelists include: Bijan Marashi, CEO, Xoopit Dave Rosenberg, CEO, MuleSource Farbood Nivi, CEO, Grockit Carl Showalter, General Partner, Opus Capital

Date: Thursday, March 20 Time: 7:15 - 8:15 a.m. Light Breakfast & Networking 8:15 - 10:15 a.m. Panel Discussion

Location: Orrick 1100 Marsh Road Menlo … Read more

JBoss + iWay PR disappearing act--whither Open Source SOA at Red Hat?

A month or so ago I saw a press release that discussed how JBoss was working with iWay to "bring a full range of information management capabilities to global organizations" and didn't think much of it. In fact, I thought so little that I just ignored it until today someone mentioned that they couldn't find that release on the RedHat website. After a bit of digging we figured out that it must have been an iWay release and that RH decided to lump it into a bigger press release about their SOA (service oriented architecture) platform.

In the Red Hat release there are a number of new JBoss partners, only one of whom has any open source products. The real IT world has both open source and proprietary products and they all need to work together. And lots of companies use the JBoss app server very successfully with all kinds of applications.

But the SOA products have been a bit slow out of the gate and so it's the iWay partnership that I find interesting as it begs a few important questions. … Read more

Fake Startups Compete for 'Worst Website Ever'

Once upon a time, SXSW was a music festival and then it became something else that I don't understand. So, just when I thought that SXSW was only about Sarah Lacy vs. Marc Zuckerberg I read about this great contest to come up with the worst website idea. The sad part is that I could see all 7 of these getting funded a few months back.

Based on the descriptions, my winner is: Entrepreneur: Lane Becker, co-founder of GetSatisfaction Bad idea: MMOmmerce, the future of the future of commerce The pitch: Shop for real-life items within MMOs. Frag Nazis … Read more

HP's new R&D direction sounds like 5 years ago

As HP Redirects Its R&D Toward Big Results one would expect to hear something new and exciting, or maybe some clarity about what the company is planning to actually do. Instead we get a fantastic array of buzzwords from the last 5 years.

1. Mobility They project that use of computing devices must seek to become seamless, so that users are transferring information and working within a familiar interface as they move beyond their offices. Information will continue to explode, so capturing and storing information will be less important than analyzing and delivering the right information at the … Read more

Ask.com--Oprah's favorite search engine

I am all for Ask.com targeting their product, but going after "married women primarily living in the southern and midwestern United States" seems like a death march.

I guess the power of Google really can't be beat...Microsoft should start targeting teens in the Ozarks as they realize they can't compete.

OStatic? Um, yeah, there have been open source news blogs for years already

I just checked out the "big news" that GigaOm just launched an open source news blog called OStatic. I guess this is sorta interesting in light of the fact that it's aggregating some blog stuff along with open source projects? Why didn't SourceForge ever figure this out?

At the risk of sounding bitter I need to point out that there have been a wide range of open source news blogs for a number of years. Both Matt Asay and I have been writing about open source extensively since 2003 and other guys like Dana Blankenhorn and … Read more

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets! Aren't these just video games?

Today's BusinessWeek Technology home page has six (6) pieces (!) on Widgets and why they may or may not matter. After reading the articles and avoiding the podcast and videos I came away with one thing: video games still rule.

All of the successful widgets and widget makers profiled in BW get adoption and traffic because they are essentially very small video games. And people love video games. I myself wasted 20 minutes playing BurgerTime over on the Widgetbox website.

Case in point, this guy at Berkeley is the king of Facebook quizzes.

Between July and September, Nagpal created four … Read more

MacBook Air one month check (Verdict: It's great)

For all of those who were concerned about the lack of DVD, battery life, etc. on the MacBook Air I can tell you that I have been using the computer very successfully with no issues for a month now.

While I am sure that I will be bored of this machine in a few months it's a non-issue compared to the alternatives: the burden of a pretty giant MacBook, or switching to Windows.

The only problems I have run into are the same things that I have experienced with every Apple laptop; the fact that 'sleep' doesn't always … Read more