Hon Wong

Accelerators, Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), application switches...whatever you call them, this new breed of performance enhancing appliances is selling like hotcakes. The market for these turbochargers has zoomed from zero to over $1 billion in the span of a few years, heading towards what Gartner estimates will be $3.7 billion in annual sales in 2008. Yet even as IT organizations are spending up to $100,000 a pop on these boxes, few have any idea how well they're working. These high-octane accelerators are like Formula One racecars without a speedometer - the pedal is to the metal, but is it fast enough? Racing without a speedometer might be fine on an empty test track, but as enterprises deploy increasingly complicated and crowded Service Oriented Architect... (more)

ITIL: The Blueprint for SOA Success

In its day the colossal Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. When it fell in the fourteen century, the building blocks were reused by the Sultan of Egypt to build the Citadel at Qaitbey that still stands today. Waste not, want not. Our modern concept of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) updates the ancient approach to recycling. The SOA technology... (more)

SOA or DOA

Web applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) promise to greatly improve IT efficiency and business agility. SOA establishes data and protocol standards so that existing internal and third-party application modules or services can be reused and orchestrated into business applications. Unfortunately, while SOA enables the rapid implementation of business applications, it... (more)

Needle in an App Stack

Although the .NET Framework simplifies the challenge of developing distributed Web applications, it increases the complexity of deploying, and then managing, those applications. The adoption of Web 2.0 techniques and SOA Web Services only amplify this complexity, making performance assurance a serious challenge as applications move from a limited staging server into a full-scale producti... (more)

Overcome the Frustrating Lack of .NET Deployment Tools

Developing custom applications using Microsoft's .NET Framework is a growing trend. According to Forrester Research, 56% of enterprises are choosing .NET versus 44% opting for J2EE, while IDC reports that 35.7% of large corporations use .NET for their most important applications compared to 25.3% for Java. While .NET lets your development team develop applications quickly and efficiently... (more)