Mashed Articles

IBM keeps acquiring other companies:

• Lombardi being a BPM solution of which some of my colleagues are quite enthusiatic.
• Sterling is more an “old” player in the B2B space with products such as Gentran for B2B communication and ConnectDirect for managed file transfer. But Sterling is also an Integration Service Provider (Garnter) or still call it a Value Added Network? IBM sold its VAN to GXS quite a while ago.
• Cast Iron Systems which is a new kid on the block, with a solution specificially targeting cloud integration. Also available as an appliance. And Cast Iron was rumoured to be developing a cloud based integration offering.

Funny to see and “old” (Sterling) and brand “new” player (Cast Iron) being acquired in the same timeframe. Of course I’m curious to see what IBM will do with these acquisitions. Will they die in a corner or be successor of the DataPower success story? And how will they explain and position all these technologies at customers?

Will data entry outsourcing, call center, internet marketing, web development and other IT outsourcing work going to dead in 2010? As many countries against the outsourcing work and trying to give more employments within the country. This philosophy is great, but what about the proficiency and cost matter. Though outsourcing service buyer always in needs of affordable and accurate services. Hope for the best, outsourcing contract will not be stopped. But it will increase day by day. As new businesses are growing, their needs are increasing and it generates certain employment and outsourcing work increasing.

We can say, in past numbers of data entry outsourcing projects were posted on various freelancing and outsourcing portal, and nowadays number of posting data entry outsourcing projects are decreasing. Similarly the payouts of data entry are also decreasing due to immense competition.

For the past twenty five years America and to a certain extent other countries have witnessed out sourcing of data entry jobs to lower paying, unregulated and non-unionized workers in developing countries. This has created hardship for the average white collar worker to the point where it is adversely affecting the economies of once strong and vibrant nations. This outsourcing of data entry jobs is starting to create disparities in standards of living that have now been flipped on their proverbial heads. At one time “have-not” nations were in political, economic and social stagnation desperately waiting for handouts from first world countries. What are we seeing today? What are the trends?

Read more: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Data-Entry-Outsourcing-Going-To-Dead-In-2010-/881807#ixzz0pHg2IbvA
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

Amazon keeps extending its cloud offering. They have just added Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). SNS is a publish/subscribe mechanism.

Integration-As-A-Service
As explained in earlier posts, I expect Integration-As-A-Service to become more important. One of the larger players (Amazon, Google, EMC, Cisco, Microsoft, …) may one day come up with a wonderful solution for Business-2-Business communication between organizations.

When I first learned about Simple Queuing Service of Amazon back in 2006, I intially thought that SQS could serve as a transport mechanism for B2B communication. But that didn’t work out. As the message size of SQS was very limited, data first had to be stored on S3. Authentication and authorization were also very limited.

So I looked around in the SNS documentation to see what SNS actually is and see if it can serve as a basis for B2B communication. Amazon thinks SNS is usable for B2B or application integration:
Application integration: Amazon SNS can be used in workflow systems to relay events among distributed computer applications, move data between data stores, or update records in business systems. For example, in an order processing application, notification messages may be sent whenever a transaction occurs; a customer places an order, the transaction is forwarded to a payment processor for approval, and an order confirmation message is published to an Amazon SNS topic.

Some facts

• Messages can be published over HTTP, HTTPS, E-mail or SQS
• Proprietary solution/mechanism, not based on any standard (no AS1, AS2, SFTP, WS-Notification, WS-Eventing, …)
• Messages are (again) limited to 8KB. Just like SQS: too small.
• Authentication is based on AWS accounts, so also every subscriber requires an AWS account, hindering factor.
• Messages are pushed, not polled. This is good for performance. For polling, use SQS.
• But when pushing, the subscriber must expose a web service or mail account. How to secure this: no authentication from Amazon to endpoint receiving notifications; no basic auth, no support for client certs, …
• Messages are signed by Amazon. This is good, very good. Signing is based on HmacSHA256.

Conclusion:
Nice and interesting, but not good enough… In particular the message size remains a blocking factor.

Questions left:

• What happens if messages cannot be delivered for a longer periode of time? E.g. when a subscriber disappears?
• How does a message that is published over HTTP exactly look like (signed, JSON)? What parameters are passed in the URL?
• Can an SSL endpoint with self-signed cert receive notifications?
• What if SSL cert of endpoint is expired?
• Are mail messages signed and if yes, how?
• How and when are messages actually persisted?
• The publish service isn’t idempotent it seems?

PS: all based on reading the docs, must confess that I didn’t actually test it