Posted on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 10:20 AM
As you may have heard Salesforce.com have decided to change the date of the upcoming UK leg of their International tour to September 8th following the possibility of a London tube strike. This has caused quite a logistical headache but needless to say Magic Software will be there whatever it takes.
As a Gold sponsor we will be offering our FREE integration demos throughout the day, however if you cant make the new date we will also be offering demo by Webex in the days following the event. The topics include:
- Integrating Salesforce.com with SAP Business One
- Integrating Salesforce.com with JDE
- Integrating Salesforce.com with all of your applications
- Mobilising all of your applications including Salesforce.com on one screen
To book your demo at the event or to register for a Webex to suit your needs simply follow this link.
If you select the Webex option we will contact you to arrange a mutually convenient time.
So to those if you attending the event see you next week here's hoping its not just the two of us :D.
Posted on Wed, Aug 25, 2010 @ 05:00 AM
As you may have seen from our press release on Tuesday our regional office has been very busy this summer signing four great new iBOLT partnerships with Admiral Consulting, Nexus 451, Forza Consulting and SMB Group. These companies are all experts in their field and we look forward to working together much more closely over the coming years.
As a brief introduction I just wanted to outline who each of the partners are and how we will be working together to grow the Magic Software community.
Admiral Technology are specialists in the Salesforce and JD Edwards fields and will be using iBOLT focus its attention on the small and medium sized business market to provide high value, enterprise class consulting without the traditional software consultancy price tag.
Nexus451, based in Dublin will be using the iBOLT for Salesforce.com integration suite to provide Salesforce.com integration with a range of other on-premise enterprise applications to provide customers with a fuller view of their business operations
UK based SMB Group have utilized the iBOLT for SAP integration suite to launch SmartCX, an SAP process integration solution that integrates all data and processes across multiple application environments (including Microsoft Applications) and eliminates the need for individual software interfaces.
Forza Consulting are currently using iBOLT for JD Edwards to integrate and enhance the capabilities of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World ERP systems for customers throughout Europe and will now be offering their services to the UK market.
I think these signings really serve to highlight the fact that despite the economic tales of woe business is picking up and I look forward to announcing some new wins soon.
Posted on Thu, Aug 19, 2010 @ 04:35 AM
I have just returned from a very relaxing, if somewhat wet long weekend in the Loire valley. I have to say I loved every minute the Chateaux’s, the wine, the cheese it was all simply bliss until, that is, my lovely assistant Krissy rang me in a blind panic on Thursday afternoon. The problem: I had left the office without approving a PO to make a very vital and urgent payment (I won’t go into but let’s just say had I not approved the PO I would have had some very disgruntled employees come the end of the month).
In our modern times with mobilised workforces you would think this shouldn’t be a huge problem but when it comes to our SAP system it is. Due to the very sensitive nature of the information within access is restricted in such a way that simply logging on via the web is not possible, officially I need to log in over VPN or to be at my desk in my office to approve payments. In an attempt to get away from it all I hadn’t taken my laptop, assuming anything I needed to be done could be done over the phone or by email.
So the dilemma was should have been abandon my lovely break and head back to the UK to approve the payment, threatening the peace and harmony of the Akka household, or risk the wrath of my staff. So what you may ask did I do? Simple I poured another glass of red fired up my mobile and approved the payment via SAP where I sat! Technology it seems saved the day.
So how was this all made possible? Simple with Magic Software’s ERP mobile client. Our mobile client offers businesses the ability to extend logic and data of their applications such as ERP, and in my case SAP, into mobile devices. Sales people or in this case forgetful MD’s can access the main system securely (i.e. not by a web browser) so they can work as if they are actually in the office. It’s a God send trust me, not only can it rescue holidays but it also available on widely available handset technology based on 3G and does not require investment in specific devices.
I have included some shots of how the scenario would look on my desktop and how it was presented on my mobile, obviously I did not take these live on my holidays for the reasons mentioned above .
For further information on mobilising your ERP feel free to download our brochure here.
Posted on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 08:44 AM
The worldwide Cloudforce Tour rolls into London on September 7th the event promises to be a good one offering attendees the chance to "experience at first hand, the mobile, collaborative and social innovations that are driving the Cloud 2 revolution"
As one of the Glod Sponsors I would like to invite you to join us for a FREE demo on how to integrate your Salesforce.com data with your existing applications, to streamline processes and ultimatley improve the way you do business.
Pre-bookable demos include;
- Integrating Salesforce.com with SAP Business One
- Integrating Salesforce.com with JDE
- Integrating Salesforce.com with all of your applications
- Mobilising all of your applications including Salesforce.com on one screen
To book your demo slot simply follow this link and complete your details.
I look forward to seeing you at CloudForce but if you do have any questions or suggestions on what you would like to see around integration and Salesforce do feel free to comment below.
Posted on Fri, Aug 06, 2010 @ 08:03 AM
My colleague Sam, recently published a synopsis of an article which I wrote for eHealth Insider and I wanted to provide it here in full to open it up for your comments or questions.
On 28 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast of the US with devastating effect. More than 1,800 people lost their lives, and the total destruction of homes and property was estimated to top out at more than $81 billion. In the resulting cleanup operation, the Health Level 7 (HL7) capabilities of the Houston-Harris County Immunization Registry enabled a total of 38,360 vaccination records to be searched in rapid time. The net result was 13,377 matches that saved more than $1.5m in needless vaccinations. In addition to becoming a de facto standard in Western digital healthcare systems, HL7 is spreading through the developing world.
However, HL7 is no longer just about organising national – or even international - healthcare data. The standard is gaining credibility as a tool in managing major disaster relief efforts, and in supporting public health agencies. In the face of pandemic threats that, in the past five years alone have included avian flu, swine flu, SARS and other disease outbreaks, integrated health data is now being recognised as increasingly critical to providing both protection and health to the world populations.
Wide but fragmented adoption
This very much chimes with the overall purpose of the HL7 organisation and the HL7 protocol, which was originally designed to break down the barriers between diverse IT systems and to use a single communication protocol that supports end-to-end communication between those systems. The HL7 standards body itself has broadened over time. A meeting of the HL7 Board of Directors - the Affiliates’ Council (now renamed the “International Council” as part of a “broader strategy to highlight the global character and impact of HL7”) - recently welcomed HL7-Argentina as a member. It heard that this body: “Currently has three individual and 30 organizational members. We are all collaborating: HL7 Colombia, HL7 Chile, HL7 Mexico, HL7 Uruguay, and HL7 Brazil.”
In 2009, HL7 India saw more than 50 members swell its ranks. This explosive growth, though, has led to a somewhat fragmented adoption pattern. In some ways, this comes as little surprise - the standard has been around since Version 2.x was released in 1987, and has seen many hundreds of revisions since then. HL7 v3 was released in 2005, and has also seen a slew of revisions, which are still ongoing today. This fragmented, legacy dictated deployment model means that even across close neighbours such as the UK and Europe standards are not yet entirely consistent. Every time a vendor updates, changes or modernises their healthcare application, they also have to update and maintain the new HL7 layer.
In the EU, regional variations in National Electronic Patient Records standards (such as the AORTA system in the Netherlands) mean that complete interoperability is never guaranteed. For example, Heidelberg University Hospital is building HL7 interfaces for admission, discharge and transfer messaging and for medical document management. But to add images to the patient health records, the university has been forced to combine HL7 and DICOM messaging. The resulting complex data flow requires two different kinds of HL7 interfaces in order to get the patient identification and other information in addition to the accession number of the case.
Issues for integration engines
For ‘standardisation’ such as HL7 to work successfully, everybody must be on board. The problem is, many healthcare suppliers are still having issues with making their applications HL7 compatible in the first place, and the fact that there are a number of HL7 standards out there serves to exacerbate the problem further. Additionally, as the EU is now working hard to carve out a standardised healthcare format, HL7 is going to play an even bigger role on the continent in future.
The challenge for healthcare suppliers is to transport their current health data to the HL7 protocol and ensure consistency. In such a time-critical situation, often limited to weeks or a few months, the use of an integration engine can help to speed up the move to the HL7 standard - including those companies looking to migrate from HL7 v2.x to HL7 v3. Such platforms enable healthcare providers to become more rapidly connected, more productive, more flexible and more efficient. Such solutions are essential in order to meet the rising challenges and changes in healthcare organisation and provision. From the days when such integrations needed to be hard coded by teams of developers, the IT environment has evolved.
Today, specific industry-focused integration platforms contain pre-programmed functions and capabilities specific to transforming standard XML files to the HL7 protocol and also HL7 v2.x messages to HL7 v3 (which is based on the same XML messaging structure). When implementing common integration scenarios, extensive programming is usually required to build the interfaces and custom workflows between the applications in the enterprise. This process requires skilled programmers, using Java, C#, TCL, Python or other programming languages.
Metadata integration platforms are based upon a ‘business centric’ approach rather than the use of specific programming languages. Using pre-compiled and pre-configured business information and functionality, or ‘engines’, a metadata approach gets around the technical complexity of the integration process, allowing developers to focus instead on the information linkages and specific healthcare integration scenarios required. A metadata approach to integration also has the advantage of using a single skill set for integrating between diverse healthcare applications, protocols such as HL7, and technology environments.
This reduces integration implementation time, enabling healthcare providers to effectively test and more quickly deploy their integration.
Getting everybody on board
Whatever the means, one thing remains certain: healthcare providers must become more rapidly connected, more productive, more flexible and more efficient. HL7 offers many of these benefits, and will become increasingly vital in digital healthcare provision. However, without timely integration of new HL7 versions by vendors, as well as renewed dissemination efforts from the standards body, achievement of these efficiency goals will remain elusive.
Posted on Wed, Aug 04, 2010 @ 05:21 AM
I recently had a conversation with a journalist who made the above statement, at the time I laughed it off and assumed the guy was pulling my leg. However, the following day I read some survey results which proposed that “only 10% of senior decision makers said they fully understood what the term cloud computing meant”. I began to think over the problem and realised that it’s not that people don’t understand cloud computing it’s that the term is bandied around so freely these days that many people like my journalist friend feel it’s just a band wagon that anyone can hitch their cart to. So spurred on by the recent Does It Matter Whether It's SOA or Cloud Services debate between David Linthicum who wrote, Gartner Gets Cloud Computing Wrong and Joe McKendrick who wrote in his ZDNet blog, Does it matter it is't SOA or cloud Services? not to the business I have decided to add my two pence and outline exactly what Cloud Computing is!
Cloud Computing is defined by Wikipedia as “Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information, are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid”. The best analogy I have found is that cloud computing is the computing which is consumed like a commodity like electricity or gas, you consume electricity every time you flick a light switch but like cloud computing you do not know or need to know where that electricity comes from or where it is stored and like cloud computing you pay per use so when you switch the light off you stop consuming electricity and stop costing yourself any money.
Cloud can be broken into three commercial offerings;
IaaS - Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the delivery of computer infrastructure (currently a platform virtualization environment and in the future a distributed environment/grid) as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service and pay for them as much as they use. The biggest completion around this offering is how the “metre” for consumption works, i.e. charging per user per month; per hour; Or even per minute
PaaS - Platform-as a-Service is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It facilitates the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. PaaS provides the facilities required to support the complete lifecycle of building and delivering Rich Internet applications and services. It usually include a rapid development environment, that allows team development, from multiple locations and a multi channel deployment capabilities i.e. desktops mobile devices etc.
SaaS - Software-as-a-Service is a model of software delivery that in its core is reduction of cost and complexity for the end-user and a volume for the vendor whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. In order to compete effectively as the SaaS market the technical architecture needs to use IaaS and PaaS, any other combination (such as terminal server enablement or only virtualisation of servers) may be classified as “cloud offering” by vendors, but in the long run will struggle to survive due high cost base and lack of competitiveness.
The future of Cloud Computing survey, I mentioned before, stated that “among the most popular cloud services now are social networking sites (the 500 million people using Facebook are being social in the cloud)”.
If the explanation is so simple and so many of us are using cloud applications, why you may ask yourself are so many people confused by what Cloud means? Apparently much of the confusion is in the name as David Bradshaw, IDC European SaaS and Cloud Services Research Manager pointed out “Cloud services are not this mysterious new thing; they’ve been around for quite a while. Before we invented this term to encapsulate and categorize manages and hosted services, people were just getting on and using them”.
I would also argue that much of the confusion has also been created by those whose offerings are not Cloud ready, who are desperately trying to cling to a rising star to keep their business alive. Don’t forget that the first rule of sales and marketing is to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Cloud is one area where FUD currently reigns supreme, the first and best defense against this is always knowledge so arm yourself well and the next time you see a SOA vendor at a Cloud event keep walking!
Posted on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 @ 08:09 AM
Ebiz recently ran a great blog by Scott Cleveland which discussed a survey by AIIM, AIIM had asked companies who had implemented BPM solutions what their biggest technical issues were.
They identified the below as the top four;
- Integration with other systems
- Unexpected exceptions requirements
- Over complexity of process creation and rules engine
- Shortcomings within the end user interface
Over a series of blogs I am hoping to share my thoughts on these issues with a view to aiding anyone undertaking a BPM project to overcome the hurdles listed above. I have worked on numerous BPM projects and hope to help you avoid making some of the more common mistakes I have seen over the years. In this blog I will focus on integration with other systems.
In his blog Scott suggested “Solutions to real business problems will likely require some integration. You don't need to do a complete integration, just make it so software packages can read/write where and when they need to”. However I would suggest that for any BPM project to work you must ensure you share the same information throughout all your business processes while seamlessly involving any legacy or new application within the automated business process. Starting from a point of incomplete integration, where not all information is considered and utilised, will usually set your BPM up to fail before you’ve begun.
Choosing total integration may seem like a more difficult route but I would always suggest using only a tool that allows you do complete integration of your applications. Ideally BPM integration solutions should allow you to design your business process regardless of the underlying technology or applications, allowing you to make decisions based on business logic rather than technical capabilities.
Magic Software’s offering iBOLT does just that, the data mapper component (in the image below) enables access to various sorts of data sources including DBMS, ODBC accessible files, XML documents and Flat files.
Using Data Mapper for visual mapping of data fields
As you can see mapping of information is done visually from source to destination irrespective of the underlying technology. iBOLT enables loose coupling between applications by separating logical and technical layers so when you have completed your business process iBOLT can automatically run across all the involved applications.
Integration may be one of the first hurdles any BPM project comes across however approaching it correctly is key to your success or failure so my advice is choose wisely and ensure that your chosen solution will allow you to take on board the years of information and knowledge which exists within all your systems. Inevitably having a full view of all your information will allow you to make better business decisions.
Check back next week, or subscribe to my feed for further installments with insights on successfull BPM.
Posted on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 @ 07:09 AM
Summer is well and truly here with Ascot already over with the World Cup coming to an end this past weekend. Summer is the time for all things bright and new so we have revamped our Newsletter with a fresh look and feel which we hope you like, however love it or hate it we would welcome your feedback.
Topics in this edition include;
- uniPaaS 2.0 is coming have your say
- World Cup Competition- the results
- Exhibiting at the Cloud Computing World Forum
- CTO Eyal Pfeifel Talks Cloud & Mobile
- 3 Essential Considerations for More Effective Mobile Application Development
Please click on the image below to see the newsletter in full.
Posted on Tue, Jul 06, 2010 @ 04:08 AM
As with everything in life, the hard part of developing a mobile application is taking that first step, and believe me I understand the reticence. Deploying an existing application to a mobile device or creating an application specifically for a mobile can be a daunting task, one which you can easily continually put off.
However when asked for advice the key thing I would suggest to any developer to succeed with producing mobile applications is;
Simplify
Traditionally developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for mobile devices involved a three layer approach Client layer, Server layer and Session layer, each of these layers requiring a different development team, with different skill sets, often using different programming languages. Obviously this could lead to complication with more chance of bottle necks forming with more dependence on individual members within the team.
This can all seem like an insurmountable hurdle before you have begun however, there is a simpler way, using an ‘end-to-end’ application platform such as uniPaaS. uniPaaS uses a single, comprehensive skill-set for all three tiers of the application development process allowing you to simplify by using pre-complied, pre-configured business logic and thus one team to do all the development work. This in turn allows
• Fewer bottlenecks
• Faster development time
• More seamless application functionality
This translates into better applications with a faster time to market.
Perhaps more importantly uniPaaS offers you the ability to choose how you deploy your applications, whether Full Client or web; on premise or on demand; in the cloud or behind the firewall; software or SaaS; mobile, global or local. So with uniPaaS you really can start developing today and deploy whenever, wherever!
For a free demo of uniPaaS Rich Internet Application demo click here.
Posted on Wed, Jun 30, 2010 @ 08:19 AM
So as many of you will know we are exhibiting at this weeks Cloud Computing World Forum, in London's Olympia, in fact I have just come back from presenting Freedom: A Practical How to Strategy for the cloud. I have to say the show itself, and my presentation, seem to have gone really well so far. Over 3000 people registered to attend the event, over 1000 came along yesterday and many more seem to have come along today. I would say I had between 100 and 150 people at my presentation.
The topic of my presentation seems to really have hit home as people are investigating not only Cloud Computing, but also how they can take that next step to deploy their applications to the Cloud. A key talking point seems to be our old friend 'The Hybrid Cloud' especially after I ran through a case study from one of our customers, a well know company who produce personal transportation devices for the 'millenial' lifestyle who have used our platform to deploy just such a Hybrid environment. I will run through the salient points here for those of you who missed out.
In order to accelerate their market penetration which was perceived to be slow, this customer decided to accompany the web and viral marketing campaigns with group events, in which they let groups experience the product. That required their channel partners to organize such events, publish details, register participants, and handle the logistics. The solution had to deal with a combination of requirements that are usually handled by distinct software product – Content Management, Process Management, Procurement, Accounting, Resource Allocation and more. The business case did not justify a long and expensive project and the acquisition and integration of several systems, and this was well beyond the scope of Situational Applications. so the CIO saw here an opportunity to use one of the new platforms that claim agile development and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. The objective was to provide the various functions in a “cloud” manner, from a single location and a single application to partners and visitors wherever they are. The specification described a Rich Internet Application for the use of the channel partners and implementers, and a dynamic web portal to promote the events and handle registration.
Using one of the new RIA platforms (Magic Software’s uniPaaS in this case), they were able to address in one project the varied user personas and use cases, with the appropriate mix of Browser based interaction for visitors and rich interactive clients for power users – all part of a single application. Moreover, given the pure Web Architecture, the entire deployment is in a single data centre and no local installation is required. It enables to on-board new partners and scale up the channel with practically no IT hassle – a truly agile operation.
So if missed out on my presentation but would like to know more, contact us by calling 01344 667000 or by emailing us at marketing_uk@magicsoftware.com.
If you are lucky enough to be at the Show we are at booth 27 so pop along and see us with any questions.