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Showing posts from July, 2009

Effective SOA Governance with the WSO2 Governance Registry

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Tuesday, August 4, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT Registrations are now open!! Governance has become the hot topic in SOA over the past year. As companies SOA usage becomes real, widespread and line-of-business, the requirement to ensure that the systems are properly governed has emerged as the number one concern for SOA adopters. In this webinar, Paul Fremantle, CTO and Co-founder of WSO2, will explain the challenges of SOA governance and show a clear and simple approach that demystifies this complex topic.

Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…

Tony Hsieh's letter informing the merger, which HBR calls a Savvy Deal . CEO Letter | Zappos.com Today is a big day in Zappos history. This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a “definitive agreement”, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock. Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say "Amazon acquires Zappos" or "Zappos sells to Amazon". While those headlines are technically correct, they don't really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…”)

Guy Kawasaki’s 10 Questions to Ask Before You Join a Startup

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Guy Kawasaki’s 10 Questions to Ask Before You Join a Startup | MintLife | Personal Finance News & Advice How much money do you have in the bank? What is your net outflow per month? What is the post-money valuation of your last round? What can you do that your competitors cannot? What can your competitors do that you cannot? Who are your investors? Who is on your board of directors? Has anyone in the engineering team actually shipped a product? Assume that you have $0 for marketing, how would you market the product? What keeps you awake at night? Excellent list of questions. From my personal experience, I think it's also a wise move to ask a few more questions too. "11. What role do you see me playing in your company?" . This is way different from the title. Never assume that your title alone will give you leverage to succeed in a startup, especially if you are leaving behind a fast track career in a large, well structured company. And never, ever play the 10% game whe

HBR :: Yes, Your Social Media Strategy Needs Design

Yes, Your Social Media Strategy Needs Design - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org The current state of "social media" for many businesses looks more like an episode of MacGyver than Apple's design process. Duct tape and bubble gum hold together fragile tactics such as Twitter accounts run by the summer college intern (nothing against college interns) or agency-generated Facebook fan pages that have few actual fans. The article does layout some real problems. Most businesses want to be in social networks. It's a good move. However, what I have noticed is that most of us really don't have a clue what to do once there. I mean, we do fine with our personal social media presence. Then why do we fail when we try to replicate that success on behalf of our companies? I fully agree that we need design because, when I think about it, our personal success in social media sites neither happen overnight nor by accident. The presence on line is just another step forwar

The 90/10 Principle - Stephen Covey

10% of life is made up of what happens to you. 90% of life is decided by how you react. If we want to receive, we need to learn to give first... Maybe we will end with our hands empty, but our hearts will be filled with love... And those who love life, have that feeling marked in their hearts. Author: Stephen Covey Music: Yanni (Love Songs) Presented: P.C.Anton

Offbeat tools? Portals and Mashups are not!

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At least that's what CIOs in Singapore think. According to a recent survey , 59% of the responding CIOs were increasing their investments in building applications based on portals and mashups. They are also researching heavily on cloud and SaaS, which is quite obvious due to the buzz in that space of late. This trend is interesting because the challenge for today's CIOs is two fold. Reduce costs while helping their organizations grow at the same time. Mashups enable this by allowing re-use across the board. Why spend on building new applications from scratch when most of the required data is already available within the existing applications? If you have a SOA in place, things become much easier. But this isn't a must either. A case study I often bring up is the US Federal IT Dashboard. Although it seemed to have appeared overnight, this was an initiative started way back when Vivek Kundra was the CTO for the DC government. If you look at his work from around 2008 onwards,

SIGNS

Someone in my network shared this on Facebook today. A simple short film about communication by director Patrick Hughes . I'm not a movie critic. But I like this clip and this is my blog. If you love the soundtrack too like I do find about it here .

It's release time @ WSO2

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Last week, WSO2 released the .next versions of some of our key products (all free and Open Source under Apache 2.0). WSAS and ESB are two of them. In my view, our Registry solution is the one that went through a metamorphosis. Not only did we re-brand the product as WSO2 Governance Registry (G-Reg for short), but we also managed to deliver technically. Building and evolving a product family is similar to solving a jigsaw puzzle. You start with the most obvious pieces and incrementally go towards the end goal. Sometimes, you find out that your assumptions while putting together some pieces were wrong. Then you have to re-visit that part of the puzzle and sort it out. The Registry vs Governance debate was one such instance where we saw that these, practically, should be a single solution. Today we have the WSO2 Governance Registry, a product that helps users not only to store things, but also to govern their SOA. As I said, the puzzle is yet to be completed and we are in the process of

HBR :: Love Your Product and Live Longer

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Love Your Product and Live Longer - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org Contrast Carasso's long-term dedication to yogurt with the way many businesses have been conceived in recent years — as empty vessels for making money rather than enduring contributions to well-being. Before the recession, the world moved so fast that tech products could become obsolete in months, if not minutes. Before the recession, some entrepreneurs dreamed less of their product and more about cashing out. During the recession, some entrepreneurs are undoubtedly thinking about giving up rather than selling even harder. Featured in this article; Daniel Carasso (December 16, 1905 – May 17, 2009) Groupe Danone [2008 Profit €1.313 billion]

WSO2 WSAS 3.1.0 Released!

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Azeez's Notes | WSO2 WSAS 3.1.0 Released! New Features ------------ 1. Experimental Equinox P2 based provisioning support. See https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support 2. Various bug fixes and enhancements to Apache Axis2, Apache Rampart, Apache Sandesha2 & WSO2 Carbon, including security fixes 3. Architectural enhancements to WSO2 Carbon Downloads available here

US CIO Vivek Kundra on the new federal IT Dashboard

A 30 minute Q&A session covering dashboards, mashups, sharing & building a community as well as auditing what's reported on these dashboards and mashable data feeds. This session pretty much covers what any end user or a CIO would expect from a Dashboard and the best part is? it's a real world example happening right now .

#OSCON 2009 is "Open for Business" and WSO2 will see you there

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Look for us and find out what we've been up to ... OSCON 2009 - O'Reilly Conferences, July 20 - 24, 2009, San Jose, CA Now more than ever, open source technology is the smart choice for navigating uncertain economic waters. In a competitive business environment, open source gives you the means to drive down costs while increasing system and staff efficiencies. OSCON 2009 is where you'll find the latest information and new ways to connect with the growing community that is open source.