Autumn Newsletter

The latest version of the company newsletter can be found at http://docs.griffiths-waite.co.uk/newsletter/201110/newsletter.html

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> ONE Magazine “Smart Strategies for Midsize Organizations”

The Power of Specialisation

An interview with Griffiths Waite's Business Development Director highlighting the benefits of the Oracle Specialization Programme.

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GW Scoop 'Business Partner' Supplier of the Year Award

Griffiths Waite is celebrating being commended for an award for its work with Motability Operations, the business behind the Motability car, powered wheelchair and scooter schemes for disabled people. The accolade, awarded at the sixth annual Motability Supplier Awards, recognises excellence, efficiency and innovation.

The award recognises Griffiths Waite's recent implementation of a major SOA Suite 11g project which went live in April. A specialized SOA partner being commended as a Business Partner shows the reach of SOA and BAM as a major business tool.

Pictured - Griffiths Waite's Directors Mark Waite and Ian Heathcock receiving their award from BBC broadcaster Huw Edwards.

Case Studies and Customer Snapshots to follow.

Read Full Press Release

Griffiths Waite at Oracle Open World

Griffiths Waite's Mark Simpson is again speaking at this years Oracle Openworld Event.

He has two speaking slots:

Enterprise Architecture and SOA Governance: People, Process, Technology (and Compromises?) (9303)

Length		1 Hour
Abstract		This session presents a case study of a technology refresh program to modernize the organization's enterprise applications while implementing a platform of processes and services to support the evolving business model. SOA governance is essential to ensure that capability is built with each project to deliver the services and processes required for long-term strategic goals while meeting the immediate project needs and adapting along the way. Setting up the initial enterprise architecture and governance framework is only a first step. The real challenge arrives when the projects commence, and how the inevitable enterprise architecture and SOA compromises are dealt with could well be the defining factor of whether such a program is a success.
Track		MIDDLEWARE:Service-Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management
Optional Track		MIDDLEWARE:Middleware for Enterprise Applications
Cross Stream Track		CROSS STREAM:Engineered Systems
Speaker		Mark Simpson, Griffiths Waite
Type		Conference Session
Category		Case Study
Attendee Role		Architect, Executive Management (C-level, President, EVP, SVP, VP)
Tags Add Tag		SOA Governance ,Oracle Enterprise Repository ,Technology Strategy ,Enterprise Architecture Roadmap ,Enterprise Architecture

Oracle SOA Suite: Supporting Changing Market Demands (9066)

Length		1 Hour
Abstract		This session is a case study of how a U.K.-based vehicle leasing company has implemented Oracle SOA Suite to manage the remarketing lifecyle of a vehicle as it approaches the end of its lease. The session introduces 11g lessons learned and best practices implemented that enable the solution to work within the framework of a technology refresh program while enabling the market-driven ongoing business change. The solution contains an e-commerce Web site for marketing vehicles, long-running processes to enable different business rules and policies to be applied to the vehicle at different stages of its lifecycle, BAM dashboards for monitoring business performance, and an integration layer connecting the solution to multiple changing legacy systems.
Track		MIDDLEWARE:Service-Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management
Optional Track		ORACLE DEVELOP:Service-Oriented Architecture
Cross Stream Track		CROSS STREAM:Engineered Systems
Speaker		Mark Simpson, Griffiths Waite
Type		User Group Forum (Sunday Only)
Category		Case Study
Attendee Role		Architect, LOB Manager/Director
Tags Add Tag		BAM ,SOA Suite 11g ,SOA Design ,SOA Best Practice ,SOA Business Change ,User group forum

Oracle Launches Exastack

Find out about Oracle's new partner ISV programme - Exastack.

http://www.oracle.com/partners/en/opn-program/oracle-exastack/index.html

Webinar Invite

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EMEA Community Forum great success

I have just returned from the EMEA SOA Community event in Utrecht. It is probably the best Oracle forum event I've been to in over a decade of being being an Oracle Partner. Join the community now to ensure you don't miss out on next years event.

http://blogs.oracle.com/soacommunity/

BPM 11g PS3

A most interesting article on Oracle's recent release discussing the new features and how PS3 adds value to the whole SOA message.

http://redstack.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/what-bpm-adds-to-soa-suite/

SOA has been maturing over the last 3 years, early adopters might have made their early pioneering steps 5 or 6 years ago. But how mature are your SOA based systems and implementations and which projects are your next candidate ones?

This 15 minute survey may help lead the way...

Griffiths Waite's Speaking at OUG Irish Conference

Presentation Title:	Key Success factors for Fusion (Middleware) Projects
Speaker:	Mr Mark Simpson
Company:	Griffiths Waite
Co-presenter:
Presentation abstract:	Fusion Applications are built on the next generation technology stack with a core focus on catalogs of Services, Processes and Portals driven by user customisations. It is a different way of architecting applications from the tradition client server. Implementors will need to change the way teams and projects are structured to deliver solutions in this new architecture. SOA, BPM and User Interface skills will be key and projects will become iterative and agile. This session will share experiences from a team who have built many business focussed flexible solutions on top of this new technology and give a number of pointers to how your projects should be strcutured to build on top of and extend Fusion Technology and Applications.
Presentation begins:	30/03/2011 16:15
Presentation duration:	45
Presentation content level:	3 (1 = indepth, 5 = strategic overview)
Audience experience:	Experienced (2-3 years)
Audience function:	Customer / Senior Manager, Functional Manager, Partner
Speaker biography:	Mark leads the SOA consultancy practice at Griffiths Waite. As well as delivering many successful SOA implementations across multiple clients, he is a strong contributor to the community through his role as an Oracle ACE Director. In 2009 he was awarded with the EMEA SOA Partner Community Award for Outstanding Contribution. He has over 15 years experience with Oracle Technologies and currently specializes in SOA and BPM, with multiple articles published on these subjects. He is a frequent speaker at UKOUG, other Oracle Events (Open World, ODTUG etc.) and analyst conferences (Ovum, Gartner, IDC etc. ).
Related topics:	Fusion Middleware: General Fusion Middleware

More Details on Event

SOA Specialization for Griffiths Waite

Griffiths Waite Limited has today announced that it has achieved Oracle® PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized status for Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture [SOA]. The OPN Specialization programme offers Oracle’s most experienced and committed partners the opportunity to show differentiation and competitive edge in particular areas of the Oracle portfolio.

This represents a significant achievement for Griffiths Waite, because to achieve specialized status, Oracle partners are required to meet a stringent set of requirements based on the needs and priorities of the customer and partner community. By achieving specialized distinction, Griffiths Waite has been recognised by Oracle for its expertise in delivering services specifically around Oracle SOA Suite 11g through competency development, business results and proven success. Oracle SOA Suite 11g is an integrated, best-of-breed suite that helps customers rapidly design and assemble, deploy and manage, highly agile and adaptable business applications.

Read Full Press Release

Preparing for Fusion Applications

Griffiths Waitedeveloped a series of Oracle Fusion Middleware online seminars. Mark Simpson Oracle ACE Director gives an insight of the Oracle strategy, how Oracle is using Fusion Middleware to build Fusion Applications and how you can profit in your project from the Fusion Architecture.

Giving examples how customers can adopt use cases for Application Integration & Composite Application Portals & Application Modernization & Business Process Management. If you are interested make sure you watch the online seminarand take the SOA Maturity Assessment

Griffiths Waite are SOA Specialized and active members of the SOA Partner community. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required)

View Webinar

SOA Books for OOW2010

Open World is upon us once again and no, the is not a review of the latest Iain Banks novel to accompany you through your travels to San Francisco. Instead it is a guide to some of the books that I am looking forward to picking up at Open World - or in some cases have already received and are in prominent places on the bookshelf.

Each year Open World is greeted by the release of a number of key technology books, often seen as a target for authors and publishers of Oracle texts. It is a great chance to browse through the latest releases and meet up with authors at various panel and launch events. With SOA, this year is no exception. There are a variety of books on the subject being released either just before OOW or at the conference. I have picked out a selection here that any current or aspiring Oracle SOA Deveoper or Architect should look out for.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer's Guide

Antony Reynolds, Matt Wright

I was delighted when this book was updated for SOA Suite 11g, our team at Griffiths Waite used the original book extensively as it adds real examples to the theory that you get through training and tutorials. It also gives valueable advice on how to structure services and which tools to use for which purpose. It is hard enough authoring such a book when you are based in the same office, so since the relocation of Antony and Matt to the US and Australia respectively it is a great credit to get the update released.

Oracle SOA 11g Handbook

Lucas Jellema

I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book, it promises to be a key "go to" source in our reference library. I have seen a lot of contributions from other ACE Directors, experts in particular tools and most importantly much time spent by Lucas in getting each and every scenario from the book working in his case study environment. As well as writing the book, Lucas has also delivered an enterprise scope project for the fictional hospital that forms the underlying case study. This book promises to be practical, complete and more than the sum of all the parts.

Service-Oriented Architecture : An Integration Blueprint

Guido Schmutz, Daniel Liebhart, Peter Welkenbach

A comprehensive walk through the differing types of architectures that you will experience, from data integration to service orchestration and event architecture. The book first introduces the various principles and models in integration. If you are looking for terminology, protocols and patterns to be explained, this book does a good job. An integration blueprint / reference architecture is presented, splitting the architecture into layers. This model maps closely to others I have used, but I would say it is a little more vendor agnostic than most that go to this level of detail, which is useful for those who have not selected middleware tools yet. One very useful section is presented at the end showing how products (covering Oracle FMW, IBM Websphere, MS Biztalk/.Net and Spring/Open Source) map onto this arhcitectural blueprint. This was very interesting for me with, as to date most of my implementations have been purely Oracle based.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Patterns

Harish Gaur, Markus Zirn and Contributors

Harish and Markus have done a fine job over the last couple of years in bring together a series of articles that showcase the use of muliple Fusion Middleware tools together. It includes some very innovative use cases. Often I get asked about perceived overlaps between Oracle products and get asked to recommend which tools to use for which pupose and which scenarios to combine the tools - this book will be a good starting point to show examples wo back up these discussions. One of the chapters is an article I contributed last year with a colleague and shows the potential of combining SOA with BAM and BI. The project in question is not at this level of innovation yet, but has a solid SOA and BAM base to build on top of and start to realise some of the innovative benefits shown in the article.

Lots of reading over the next couple of weeks then, it will be a busy time.

OOW09 - A Cast of Thousands

I am still recovering from a whirlwind week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World.

It is a truly awesome event in in the true sense of the word. I found it hugely entertaining, tiring and of great value.

It was a week of stars and celebrities, from the size of the Keynotes from Larry, Thomas and others, to the down to earth nature of James Gosling, the celebrity of Arnie, Stanley, Aerosmith and Roger Daltry, capped with the appearance of Obama at our hotel.

However the real cast of Open World are the delegates themselves and the people you get chance to chat with on a daily basis. First of all it was great to meet up with the ACE Directors, a fantastic opportunity to talk with Oracle Product Managers and engineers, but also it is so beneficial to talk with other consultants and customers, it is through these chats that you really get to the ins and outs of how Oracle Technology is helping (or on the odd occassion not) delivering software. Some great chats with other UK delegates, normally in bars or restaurants (!), that seem rarer in the UK events. I think this is because the Moscone area of SF turns into an almost 24 by 7 Open World Village. Not quite the scale of the Olympics - but if the acquisitions continue !?!

From the sessions, my 3 personal highlights where :-

• The prominence of SOA and BPM in the executive keynotes. It is so clear to everyone now that Fusion is built from the ground up on these technologies and so if you haven't got a SOA/BPM strategy yet, you should really be thinking about it now and start looking into the tools. Applications Configuration will be done at the SOA services and BPM process level rather than at the Data level - so skill up now.
• It was good to see Fusion Applications taking shape - with 1st releases coming out next year, some of the User Interface on show now is very impressive and it will only get better as the applications roll out.
• The clarity and openess of the Oracle Technology strategy, certaintly in my areas of focus. The customer advisor boards were excellent this year and spawned lots of interesting conversation and advice between the delegates, if you were considering attending one of these for you focus area I recommend it strongly for the future. The hands-on workshops where based on future releases and in BPM gave clarity to how this would fit into the SOA stack, showing this at an early stage in the release cycle was very appreciated by the participants that I spoke to. I can now confidently advise my customers. In general all tricky questions on SOA and BPM where tackled headlong and not much was avoided, apart from the elephant of an aqcuisition in the room that is pending - although the keynotes made most of the intentions pretty clear.

All in all an excellent way to spend a week, just need a week to recover. I will follow up on some key learnings from OOW09 in the SOA and BPM space..

Enterprise Solution Cookbook - SOA + BI

Building Intelligent Processes with Insight-Driven Agility

For those of you who found the BPEL Cookbook useful when it was published a few years back, you will find the new series of OTN Enterprise Solution Patterns interesting. The BPEL Cookbook focussed on innovative patterns for using BPEL and including some useful SOA techniques - this series looks at more enterprise wide patterns that are suited to combining middleware technologies.

The series of articles will cover the use of multiple elements of the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack together to produce innovative business oriented solutions. The first 4 articles of this Enterprise Solution Cookbook are now live, with further articles being published over the coming months.

There will be a number of patterns covering SOA working with other technologies, this first set of articles includes one on BPA and SOA -"Process Driven SOA Development" and one on SOA and BI that I co-authored with one of my colleagues, Matt, from a current project "Building Intelligent Processes with Insight-Driven Agility".

This article discussing some key business scenarios of combining the two technologies to enrich business processes and business rules with key business intelligence data to map them closer to the way an organisation operates and to ensure business intelligence becomes truly actionable by automatically invoking processes to deal with threshold breaches on key metrics.

I'd like to thanks Harish and Neela from Oracle Product Management for their support in getting this article completed and published.

Fusion Middleware 11g Launch comes to London

For those who saw the webcast yesterday with Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian, you will have seen an impressive run through of the new middleware stack. You will also have seen how important this middleware technology is to Oracle's business both in its own right and as the foundation for Fusion Applications. It is a $1BN plus business in its own right and growing at an unprecented rate (rivalling the growth that was seen in the database business). Today the roadshow comes to London and I will be excited to see partners and customers reactions. I have been exposed to Fusion Middleware 11g for a while now - especially the SOA Suite elements and I have been impressed.

The release has been eagerly anticipated and it is great to see it ready for production release. The current 10g middleware stack has enabled us to deliver automated, agile and visible business processes for a large number of customers using components within SOA Suite and BPM Suite including BPEL, Rules, BPM, BAM and ESB.

The release of SOA Suite 11g is worthy of the term next generation – it greatly extends the current stack with key functionality, such as richer support for events, extended packaging and deployment options, a Java version of Business Activity Monitoring component, new user interface for Business Rules, better and more extensible Human Workflow, more use of ADF as the strategic framework for building user interfaces and a multitude of important enhancements to each individual component.

In addition to key new features, SOA11g is the first fully integrated enterprise SOA infrastructure available from Oracle (and on the market if you compare the necessary features for an enterprise class rollout of SOA), bringing together seamlessly the best components from the BEA and Oracle stacks. Choosing Weblogic Server as the foundation for 11g SOA will allow us and our customers to leverage the comprehensive J2EE, Spring, transaction and thread management, messaging and clustering support from a best in class Application Server.

The integration spans the whole stack above the Application Server; all components are now fully integrated. The new support for Service Component Architecture (SCA) is providing a standardised assembly and deployment model to simplify the design and management of all the moving parts. Another key component in bringing all the pieces together is Metadata Services (MDS) – this is something we will be hearing a lot about over the next few years as it is one of the key elements of the whole Fusion Middleware Architecture. MDS is a metadata repository underpinning all components across FMW 11g allowing all components to access and is what enables the rich drill-down and navigation capabilities between the components at design and runtime – it will simplify the management of the your solutions and ensure compatibility with future releases.

FMW 11g is a major release, it has been 3 years in the making with a huge investment in testing – from what I have seen in the technology previews and early access releases it looks well worth the time spent.

Visit the Oracle SOA landing page for more information on the 11g products

Are you ready for the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launch

Welcome to my blog. The 11g launch seems the perfect catalyst to start sharing my thoughts and experiences on Oracle middleware. I am a UK based ACE Director for Fusion Middleware with a lot of experience of SOA solutions through many many implementations - I will be telling you about some of these over the coming months.

Oracle releases its next generation middleware tomorrow on 1st July 2009 which will underpin Fusion Applications. Its an existing time for all Oracle customers and partners and I will be giving my thoughts as soon as the launch is over ..