Blog: Claudia Imhoff: Was It Something I Blogged?

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Was It Something I Blogged?

Today, IBM announced it was acquiring Bowstreet - the portal company I mentioned in my November 29th blog. As you recall, I was less than flattering about Bowstreet's assertion that all you needed was a portal to integrate all your data sources together -- data warehouses need not apply...

From reading the press release, I am encouraged that IBM sees the portal technology as another piece of their SOA architectural framework rather than as a replacement for a source of truly integrated data. The company states that "Bowstreet will help further IBM's strategy around service oriented architectures (SOA). SOA, as you may know, is a standards-based framework that enables an enterprise to generate a view of the business in which the business rules or delivery of services are "decoupled" from the applications or systems that provide these services. The key to the architecture is the physical separation of the business services or rules from the transport layer or plumbing that delivers them. The application or business process itself becomes a coordinated set of services as well (e.g., processing a customer order, allocating inventory, managing data quality and so on). If interested in more information, please read an article I wrote on this subject by clicking here.

How you physically implement this architecture is, of course, up to you. You must decide what technologies or plumbing must be in place to deliver either business intelligence or business services. And this is where Bowstreet will play. Will you have bundled services called by multiple applications or separate services called independently by the various applications in your SOA? Your choice...

I can only hope that IBM does a better job of understanding that no matter what technology you throw at a problem, you must understand and treat the underlying disease (in many cases, the unintegrated nature of the various sources of data) rather than ignore it and simply treat the symptoms.

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

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