Monday, April 09, 2007

SOA blog recognizes SLA!

I was analyzing the Google Analytics for my blog recently, and noticed a small but measurable amount of traffic originating from "biske.com". Now, my Analytics are really never very exciting, so seeing an unknown domain explicitly called out was too much to ignore. I followed the domain, and arrived (after seeing a very nice family photo) at Todd Biske's Outside the Box blog.

Now, I don't know Todd from Adam, so I took some time to read through a few of his posts. His subtitle explains his focus very well: "SOA, BPM, and other strategic IT initiatives". His recent posts included coverage of the Web Methods acquisition by Software AG (I wonder what he thinks about the BEA/Amberpoint announcement), the vagrancies of developing SOA clients and services in parallel (a problem I know quite well, actually, from my past as an architect with Forte Software and Sun Microsystems), and the rapid integration of management and monitoring across all tiers of enterprise architectures (a post I want to specifically address in a later post of my own). From what I read so far, he is a fairly holistic enterprise architect with a good eye for both functional and infrastructure issues.

But why was I getting references to my site from his? I kept looking, and to my delight rested my eyes on my name in his blogroll...WOO HOO!!! The first such link that I know of!

By the way, follow some of those other blogroll links...there you will find a huge wealth of knowledge about SOA, BPM and the culture shock the distributed systems community is feeling as a result (with some calm, collected voices providing solid advice). Don't think SOA and SLA are related? You'll find lots of evidence to the contrary among the posts of Todd and his colleagues.

Thanks, Todd, and you've been added to my daily RSS feed.

4 comments:

Todd Biske said...

Thanks for the comments James, and I'm glad my blogroll resulted in some traffic heading your way. Depending on how far back in my posts you went, you may have seen that I like to discuss SOA for IT, and I think the theme of your blog fits perfectly within that domain. Keep up the discussion!

Anonymous said...

That certainly sounds like it is a problem in your office. Our network has been able to process workflow much better than it did before we hired Stratavia for help with runbook automation. We originally went with another company and started up an itil management system but it just wasn’t working out the way we though it would and switched over to Stratavia. Ours is a rather large network and so data center automation has been the key to our success in delivering dependable IT service over the last couple of years. After implementation of their software and services the company’s business software applications have all become more dependable than they ever have. Prior to the change though we found ourselves spending a large amount of hours patching the network and our programming efforts suffered as such.

Anonymous said...

I’ve been looking around the internet for reviews and info on automation solutions. I have found a number of them and all I see is BladeLogic, and Opsware. Both of these companies do indeed provide some excellent tools for IT automation but I rarely see Stratavia mentioned at all. As IT professionals aren’t we all looking for ways to improve application availability for our networks? I think it’s a sound business decision and smart as knowledgeable network engineers to try all applications out there. I’ve used just about every automation solution out there…well the more popular ones anyway and thus far I tend to favor Stratavia when I am in need of IT services. I’d encourage you to check them out too if you haven’t already.

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