The View from 40,000 feet

Author: Bryon Kataoka, iSOA Group CTO and Thought Leader

Happy New Year!  Its 2016 and I’m already traveling across the country to be a thought leader to our various customers. I have a few resolutions, or action plans, I’d like to focus on this year, but first a few thoughts for 2016, before I get into the resolutions……..

For 2016, I have a feeling that this is going to be a fantastic year for Enterprise Innovation!  With the increase in hiring in 2015 I believe we will start to see new products and innovations.  I also believe cyber security continues to be a battle we must continue to wage war on. With so many events happening around the world we cannot be complacent and stick our head in the sand.  So hang on to your hats, it is going to be a wild ride!

As a thought leader I’m always trying to find better ways of conveying information and providing solutions to my clients.  My first resolution is to try to find ways of making that easier for my customers.  My second and last resolution is to find processes and tools that make my first resolution easier.

So here is what I’m going to start with; the first thing that I’m going to incorporate in my lifestyle (both personal and professional) is “Design Thinking”.  For those of you unfamiliar with Design Thinking, it has helped entrepreneurs and engineers develop and create successful new products and businesses.  What Design Thinking does is help identify the obstacles that are holding you back from achieving your goals.

There are five steps in Design Thinking, the first two being the most important.  First is to “empathize”, that is, understand what the real issues are that you need to solve and the second is to “define the problem”.  Steps 3, 4 an 5 follow a path of brainstorming ideas and possible solutions, prototyping or design a plan and finally test the idea and garner feedback from others.

Design Thinking has been around for some time.  It is taught at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is a veritable think tank for creative ideas.  To find out more, check out this 90 minute crash course on Design Thinking:  http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/

For my second resolution I’m going to dovetail with “Design Thinking” and look to implement a tool that would help me with Step 3 of “Design Thinking”.   As I am always looking for ways to keep my brain sharp, I am planning to use “Mind Mapping” tools to help me brainstorm ideas and provide a better way to convey the information.

In the future I’ll follow up on how we are incorporating Design Thinking at iSOA Group and how you might also use Design Thinking in your daily lives.

So there you have it, my resolutions for 2016.

I wish you all a successful 2016, and I hope to see you at the IBM InterConnect Conference 2016 in February.

Bryon Kataoka is the iSOA Group, Inc. CTO sharing his experience as a technical leader for over  20 years.  In his role at iSOA Group, Inc. he is a thought leader as well as a consultant to many companies helping them be successful with their Middleware strategy and implementations.

Something borrowed, something old, and all packaged and integrated for the holidays!

At iSOA Group, Inc. we take time as I am sure you all do to be thankful for the joys this holiday season. 

Thankful for our families, our colleagues and our extended family of partners and customers.

As a company, our mission is to help companies achieve business value from their technology investments with a focus on IBM Integration technologies including DataPower, Integration Bus, API Management, MQ and WebSphere solutions.

In 2012, led by our Senior Solutions Specialist Brian Silverman, we conducted a survey before and during IBM's Impact conference to gain a better understanding of the  business value our customers have realized from our services and solutions with IBM Software.

Whether they were expanding their business, looking to be more responsive to new opportunities or looking to reduce costs, our customers shared how becoming a more integrated business brought real value to their bottom line.  For 2015, we revisited the results and conferred with our consultants.

As you would expect with the further expansion of mobile, social media and APIs the business value only grows for a truly integrated business.

We want to share our updated results of our Agile Integration Solutions Whitepaper and if would like to discuss how we along with IBM can help you become a truly integrated business please reach out to Brian at bsilverman@isoagroup.com or 508-246-7965.

We all wish you and your family a happy, healthy and joyous holiday season!

To learn more please review our Media Showcase at isoagroup.com !

Blogging from 40,000 feet

Author: Bryon Kataoka, iSOA Group CTO and Thought Leader

Another Thursday and I’m jet setting across the US.  Another typical travel day: Up at 3:00am, driving in the fog, both physical and mental (at that time in the morning). Going through TSA-Pre, watching the crowds line up according to boarding number and herding their way into the Airbus.

Boy things have changed a lot during my years flying.  It sort of reminds me of Fixed Bid contracts.  Need a change… Pay some money.  Want a better seat… Pay some money.  Now at least there is better technology on the flights.  Oh and yes … want it?  Better pay some money.

As much change as we have experienced flying we have also seen great change in DataPower.  Let’s review DataPower Past, Present and Future.

I first was introduced to DataPower in January 2006 at the IBM Software University.  So readers may not be familiar with the Software University.  Over 10 years back IBM used to have all of its consultants and selected Business Partner come to Las Vegas to learn about IBM technology.  It was a wonderful way to learn about technology.  Its sort of similar to InterConnect and formerly Impact but it excluded customers.  It was just a bunch of technology nerds getting together to talk nerdy.

I became enamored with DataPower.  It seemed like the perfect product given where technology was at that time.  XML and XSL were key technologies and Web Services were the talk of the industry.  It was wonderful to see the security capabilities in DataPower (XML Encryption, Digital Signature and WS-Security).  Remember the colors of the appliances.  Green for the XA35, Yellow for the XS40 and Blue for the XI50.  It makes me laugh when I see resumes with references to XA35, XS40.   I don’t know if they actually worked on them with only 1 year experience but it makes me wonder.

Over the years how DataPower is presented and used has changed.  It started as security but with its routing and transformation capabilities it later was labeled a lightweight ESB.  I even did a presentation at Impact called “DataPower as an ESB”.

IBM has added various addition features during the early years such as the MQ Client and WTX.  Later they added various networking and service additions.  Application Optimization, On Demand Router, Link Aggregation, Web Sockets, OAuth, Web Token Services and the list goes on and on.  There is a saying “if its not broken don’t fix it” but I prefer to label DataPower is “if it not broken, innovate”.  And it’s the innovation that continues to make DataPower a key infrastructure component to many environments.

The future is now.  DataPower now supports virtual environments and even AWS.  It’s the key component in API Management.  Its bigger and faster and I’m sure there will be more additions.

I wonder what the next big feature will be.  Only time will tell.

Ok.  The Fasten Seat Belt sign is off and its time to go!

Bryon Kataoka is the iSOA Group, Inc. CTO sharing his experience as a technical leader for over  20 years.  In his role at iSOA Group, Inc. he is a thought leader as well as a consultant to many companies helping them be successful with their Middleware strategy and implementations.

Your Personal CTO

Author: Bryon Kataoka, iSOA Group CTO and Thought Leader

Blogging at 40,000 Feet

The suitcase is in the overhead, the Bose headphones are on and I’m in my aisle seat and settled in.  The double chimes told me we have reached an altitude where I can turn on my Mac and here we go. 

My name is Bryon Kataoka and some may know me as the home winemaker of Petaluma Gap Pinot Noir or a decent fair weather golfer but first and foremost the CTO of iSOA Group.  Some clients also know me as the DataPower Guy.

With the poor Dad behind me with the screaming twin boys I know it’s time to immerse myself in some deep technical thought.  Actually it’s not a bad idea.  With some deep thought I can drown out the whine of the airplane and the uncontrollable whiners in seat 30 D, E & F.

It’s working.  My thoughts are on topics I’ll blog about in future flights.  Some thoughts I have for future blogs are:

• DataPower Past, Present and Future
• API Management – still growing
• Muscling up with StrongLoop
•  Road Warriors
• Getting your swagger
• And others

But now that the twins have quieted down (or dad’s put them in the overhead), I wanted to focus on DataPower Return on Investment (ROI).  As some of you may know, or might be learning now, your DataPower investment is chocked full of potential ROI.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen basic capabilities implemented with DataPower at the outset and then investment in the capabilities go dormant. 

Why is that?  Did the installers implement a set of use cases and then high tail it out of Dodge?  Were their changes in personnel and the expertise left or moved to another project?  I’ve experienced one client that had DataPower running for years with no changes.  Awesome for the longevity, but so much untapped potential!

So how does one go about getting more ROI out of your DataPower investment?  At the iSOA Group I lead a team of DataPower experts and we run a program called DataPower On Demand Services.  I won’t go into all the specifics but in a nutshell, think of it as having your own personal DataPower consultant.  You can learn more at www.isoagroup.com or reach out to your in-flight DataPower guy at Bkataoka@isoagroup.com.

Well, the flight attendant is here with the cart.  Time to sign off and consider what to write on my flight home!

Bryon Kataoka is the iSOA Group, Inc. CTO sharing his experience as a technical leader for over 20 years.  In his role at iSOA Group, Inc. he is a thought leader as well as a consultant to many companies helping them be successful with their Middleware strategy and implementations.  

IBM Interconnect 2015: Hybrid Cloud Integration Framework with iSOA Group and Monsanto

Bryon Kataoka, iSOA Group, CIO along with Jon Ward, Senior Middleware Engineer at Monsanto discussed the challenges and opportunities when deploying a hybrid cloud infrastructure at IBM's Interconnect 2015 Conference (session 6907).

Like many companies, the iSOA Team works with, Monsanto has a variety of legacy applications  along with cloud based enterprise applications such as Salesforce.  The key to realizing the business value of these applications was for Monsanto to create a secured, integrated, and flexible architecture that would support their effectiveness in sharing information such as inventory of offerings with their sales teams and customers.

The presentation, link to slides is below, at IBM's Interconnect 2015 documented how a Hybrid Integration Framework was developed for Monstanto highlighting the value of an SOA architecture including leveraging IBM's DataPower Gateway appliance providing:

• A solution with a RESTful and SOAP framework that incorporated REST/JSON, SOAP, OAuth and CORS to easily pave the way for establishing a secure gateway.

• An architecture strategically extended by using IBM's WebSphere Cast Iron, WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance and MQ in the SOA architecture

• A well architected hybrid integration framework Monsanto not only established a framework for local applications and the cloud (Salesforce) opening the door for mobile as well as future API opportunities. 

If you would like to learn more, please contact the iSOA Group team at info@isoagroup.com

Slides from iSOA and Monsanto Interconnect 2015 Presentation

Can I Have One Common Code Set that Runs Across Various Devices for My Mobile Apps?

Last week, Tim Cook unveiled the latest iPhones – the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C – to reporters at Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California. While the iPhone 5C will be Apple's first plastic phone, making it more affordable for those who want an iPhone on a budget, the iPhone 5S will include fingerprint recognition software, a dual LED camera lens and a 64-bit A7 processor. This is a far cry from 2007 when Steve Jobs was explaining what the original iPhone was to reporters at MacWorld. In fact, Cook remarked that over 700 million iOS devices have been sold since 2006.

However, Apple is not the only name in town when it comes to mobile devices. In fact, it's not even the biggest name – that would belong to Google. There are many different types of devices that use the Android operating system and the total amount of those devices combined far surpasses iPhones, iPods and iPads. And let's not forget about Windows. Although much smaller than the other two, Windows has seen 133% yearly growth and has over 3% of the total market share. Because of the divided market and various devices out there, businesses have a dilemma on their hands when it comes to app development.

There's no question that a business can hire third party developers to create apps in a native environment for each type of device and operating system, but this would be very expensive and difficult to update and maintain. Rather, many businesses are looking for a way to have one common code set that can be across a wide variety of devices for smart app development and maintenance. They have found their solution through the IBM Worklight platform. Here are several ways customers can benefit from this mobile application platform.

• Savings in Development: Worklight enables developers to use and reuse most of the coding for every platform. In addition, only one project is created rather than a single project for each specific platform.
  
• Savings in Integration: Rather than hire a third party developer to develop and integrate software, must of the work is done internally when using Worklight. This creates savings now and in the future for the development and integration of apps down the line. As with development, integration can be done in a single project to simplify the process.
  
• Savings in App Maintenance: Once you develop and implement a mobile app, you're not completely done with it. Correcting bugs, upgrading content and adding functions are just of the many things included in app maintenance. By using the IBM Worklight platform, you save greatly over having to perform these tasks for every single project in a native environment.

For more information on the IBM Worklight platform, contact an iSOA representative today. We specialize in systems integration consulting and can help you determine if the IBM Worklight is right for you.

How Can Businesses Stay One Step Ahead of Hackers?

For those out there who think that e-commerce is the future of retail, you’re slightly right, but many would argue that e-commerce is dominating the present as well. In 2012, shoppers in the US spent $226 billion on goods in online stores. That number was up $24 billion from the year before. By 2016, Forrester Research Inc., a global research advisory firm, estimates that online sales will go up to $327 billion. This number will account for nine percent of all sales. While this is great news for online retailers, it also creates some headaches for them in regard to data security.

Earlier this past summer, five men were charged with the largest cybercrime case of all time. It’s estimated that they were responsible for more than $300 billion lost for various companies and organizations, including J.C. Penny, Visa, JetBlue, Carrefour SA, and Nasdaq. According to the indictment, the five men would steal credit card numbers through hacking into the various networks and hide their actions through anonymous web sources. Although two of the five men are behind bars, there are a number of hackers behind them ready to jump in their place.

You’ll need an answer to withstand their efforts.  An IT consulting firm can help you find the best security solution for your particular business, but how do you choose?
You’ll need an IT consulting firm who has

• A proven history of implementing integrated software solutions
• Partnerships with IBM and other top technology providers
• Certified professionals who are experienced in a wide variety of industries

We are iSOA Group, and we’re an IT consulting firm who can help secure and integrate your business environment for online sales.  We will help your business stay on top of security on your web and mobile services through IBM DataPower SOA Appliances. As an IBM Premier Partner, our certified professionals have complete knowledge of DataPower and can tailor a solution that is unique to your needs.

For more information on what we may be able to do for your e-commerce strategy, please be sure to check out this Case Study on our work securing online transactions for a large specialty store looking to expand their online revenue. With the right partner and solution, your business can fully benefit from the expanding e-commerce market without the security threats that can accompany it. Contact us today to get started.