IBM’s launches a new Information Led Transformation Initiative

I am in Las Vegas for the IBM Gold Consultant Briefing 2009 that is being held in conjunction with the IBM Information On Demand (IOD) 2009 conference. I am well into the Gold Briefing (4th day), and am suffering a wee bit from information overload as part of the IBM Information Led Transformation (ILT) initiative! Today IBM announced its impressive ILT initiative which I see as another evolutionary step in the Information On Demand journey that was kicked off 4 years back. IBM certainly has made huge investments in this space over this period – $12B with $8B in some major acquisitions and $4B in organic R&D. And the IM portfolio certainly looks quite comprehensive with a broad range of capabilities.

The Information Stack in IBM’s words has the following pieces -

• An Information Infrastructure comprised of software, servers, and storage that provides a foundation for your information.
• Trusted Information gives you a single view of data through offerings that enable you to transform silos of information into a trusted, strategic asset that is shared across your organization.
• Business Analytics and Performance Management enables you apply analytics to optimize your business through better decisions by providing planning, budgeting, forecasting, measuring, monitoring, reporting and analysis capabilities.

With IBM, you can never have enough brand names and enough churn in product names, to make staying on top of things a challenge! IBM has it all – the newer Optim, FileNet, InfoSphere, Cognos, SPSS, ILog solutions; the more traditional Db2, Informix, CMOD products; and the cloud and mashup buzzwords. I think technically very impressive but I sure do wish that it was easier to stay connected with all the brand/product names!

Xtivia launches new “Virtual-WebSphereAdmin” Service Offering!

I am really excited about this new offering from our business unit – the official press release went out today and I could not resist blogging about it even though I am getting a bit salesy here! As Dennis said in the press release – we have been providing remote WebSphere administration and development services for various client installations that included WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, WebSphere Portal, and IBM Web Content Management. These services ranged from complete outsourcing of all WebSphere administration and maintenance needs, to on-demand consulting and mentoring. So, in essence, we have now codified these services that we have been offering for years, into pre-packaged offerings that make it simpler for prospects and customers to understand the value proposition of Xtivia’s remote WebSphere services.

An excerpt from the news release -

Virtual-WebSphereAdmin provides a cost-effective solution for organizations seeking to optimize the availability and performance of their critical WebSphere-based business information systems. This is accomplished through a comprehensive remote WebSphere Administration service designed specifically to meet the WebSphere administration, maintenance, management and consulting needs of our clients. Xtivia’s Virtual-WebSphereAdmin service combines a sophisticated suite of monitoring and reporting tools with expert consulting services to deliver complete WebSphere performance management.

You can find more details about this service at http://www.xtivia.com/remote-services/virtual-websphereadmin or you can go directly to http://www.xtivia.com/request-information to get in touch with the Xtivia sales team about this service. I am confident that you will find it worth your time to do so!

Firewall dropping Oracle database connections in WebSphere connection pool?

We recently switched one of our client’s WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal based infrastructure to a new physical environment. During our testing we found that we were getting stale connection exceptions in SystemOut.log and in the application logs. On digging a little deeper, our team tracked it down to the fact that the Cisco firewall was dropping our Oracle database connections after they had been inactive for a certain amount of time. When our team discussed the issue with the network team, they were essentially told that all was good with the network infrastructure. The application team tweaked some of the connection pool settings but that only helped alleviate the issue slightly and we started encountering performance issues. Eventually, we figured out a solution that works!

Want to test your object-oriented coding skills? Check out this code smelling exercise …

Sometime back, I wrote on Bad Smells in Code that were defined as – “A code smell identifies classic mistakes made in developing code. These mistakes typically result in code that is difficult to understand, maintain, debug, and extend.” In my previous blog entry, I captured some code smells that are commonly found in code written by new (and some experienced) programmers. Sample smells include “duplicated code”, “long method”, “inappropriate intimacy”, “large classes”, “inconsistent names”, and others. I had promised to be back later with my “code smelling exercise” that I used during my presentation to make my points about code smells. Well here it is …

How do you change the LDAP server name for a WebSphere Portal v6 server?

Today one of the portal administrators in my team was trying to reconfigure the LDAP server being used by an existing WebSphere Portal v6 install. The specific reconfiguration that he was doing was extremely simple – he was replacing one LDAP server with another identically configured LDAP server – so the only change was the name of the LDAP server. We were able to perform this change without disabling/re-enabling security in WebSphere Portal.