Development

A start-up founded by three ex-Cisco employees this week is set to announce its first product: a multifunction security device with hardware designed to minimize network performance problems when all functions are switched on, and software applications that run independently so if one fails the rest keep going.

Unification of business needs and software development is critical for enterprises, according to IBM Corp. executives speaking at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2005 in Las Vegas late last month. The officials stressed a team-based, process-oriented strategy for development.

Tony Cavaliere

BEA Systems, whose annual revenues have been mired in the US$1 billion range for several years, is forging ahead with efforts to grow through provision of application services infrastructure and SOA. Toward this end, at press time the company said that on June 9 it was planning to herald Project Free Flow, so-called because it is intended to enable free flow of information across business processes, said Bill Roth, vice-president of product marketing at BEA and a former Sun Microsystems executive.

If Bernard Hodson has his way, future computer applications will be much smaller than they are today. They will not require the aid of a massive operating system to do their work. And they

From the earliest days of the Internet, Web sites have benefited from the use of forms. The earliest version of forms used simplistic back-end CGI scripts written in Perl or other scripting languages to process the information and return the user to a thank-you page. The Web has grown up and so has the technology and methodology for building forms. They

IBM on Friday detailed an initiative intended to accelerate the business benefits of an SOA. The Business Integration Adoption Model, accompanied by new tools, workshops, and services, helps corporate users gain more flexibility by better aligning their business goals, and directly ties their business processes to underlying applications.

Several big-name companies, including Adobe Systems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp., have agreed to embrace SAP AG's new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform, the German business applications vendor is expected to announce Wednesday at its Sapphire user event in Boston. The deals follow separate agreements reached last month with IBM Corp., Macromedia Inc. and Microsoft Corp.