Next-Generation Enterprise Computing: Beyond EDOC 2006

With the increasing demand for networked and XML services, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and next-generation enterprise computing.     

云计算技术及其安全性研究

云计算被视为IT业的下一代技术架构,其概念于2007年提出,是随着虚拟化技术、分布式存储技术、网格技术和自动化管理技术的发展而产生的,能够提供一种更加灵活配置应用的途径。但是,云计算将应用软件和数据库转移到庞大的数据中心,而数据中心对数据和服务的管理并不值得完全信赖。随之产生的安全问题是提高云服务质量的难点。同时,合理采用云计算技术也能够加强产品的安全性。首先阐述了云计算环境的特性及安全需求,其次,在介绍云计算安全研究现状的基础上,对安全性评估进行了分析,最后对云计算的未来发展趋势作了展望。     

Service-Oriented Computing: Bringing Business Systems to the Web

The notion of "service" has spurred major evolutions for both information systems and the Web. A software application is no longer considered a monolithic component; it can be divided into services that are smaller components defined by their function and accessible through well-defined interfaces and protocols. As a result, IT actors are using service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to remodel the information systems of many companies while the Web is increasingly becoming a programmable place. In both domains, developers build composite client applications to consume these services. Even boundaries between enterprise services and Internet services are vanishing. Some companies, such as Strikelron provide enterprise services that were previously always hosted internally - like customer relationship management solutions. As a consequence, companies now have the technologies required to bring their business online. With Web services, private business processes can be exposed to partners through public composite Web applications. When new projects emerge, companies need guidance to properly handle such work. In this context, we aim to provide companies solutions - through a methodology, an architecture, and technical choices - that will help them solve generic problems such as security and application conception     

Virtuelle Entkopplung von fachlichen und IT-Strukturen für das IT/Business Alignment – Grundlagen,Architekturgestaltung und Umsetzung am Beispiel der Domänenbildung

IT/business alignment is one of the main topics of information systems research. If IT artifacts and business-related artifacts are coupled point-to-point, however, complex architectures become unmanageable over time. In computer science, concepts like the ANSI/SPARC three-level database architecture propose an architecture layer which decouples external views on data and the implementation view of data. In this paper, a similar approach for IT/business alignment is proposed. The proposed alignment architecture is populated by enterprise services as elementary artifacts. Enterprise services link software components and process activities. They are aggregated into applications and subsequently into domains for planning/design and communication purposes. Most design approaches for the construction of enterprise services, applications and domains are top-down, i. e. stepwise decompose complex artifacts. As an alternative which takes into account coupling semantics, we propose a bottom-up approach which is demonstrated for the identification of domains. Our approach is evaluated using a telecommunications equipment case study.     

A resource oriented integration architecture for the Internet of Things: A business process perspective

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) foresees a future Internet incorporating smart physical objects that offer hosted functionality as IoT services. These services when integrated with the traditional enterprise level services form the creation of ambient intelligence for a wide range of applications. To facilitate seamless access and service life cycle management of large, distributed and heterogeneous IoT resources, service oriented computing and resource oriented approaches have been widely used as promising technologies. However, a reference architecture integrating IoT services into either of these two technologies is still an open research challenge. In this article, we adopt the resource oriented approach to provide an end-to-end integration architecture of front-end IoT devices with the back-end business process applications. The proposed architecture promises a programmer friendly access to IoT services, an event management mechanism to propagate context information of IoT devices, a service replacement facility upon service failure, and a decentralized execution of the IoT aware business processes.     

Frameworks for Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture addresses the double challenge of increasing IT efficiency while continuing business innovation. Organizations can use enterprise architecture frameworks to manage system complexity and align business and IT resources. An enterprise architecture approach can help align business and IT resources and conform them to fundamental principles and common methodologies governing the entire information systems development process. In that sense, architectural frameworks are a convenient way to support such methodologies and separate roles that facilitate and implement these methodologies as needed. Still, many organizational and technical enterprise architecture challenges remain.     

A method for transforming knowledge discovery metamodel to ArchiMate models

Enterprise architecture has become an important driver to facilitate digital transformation in companies, since it allows to manage IT and business in a holistic and integrated manner by establishing connections among technology concerns and strategical/motivational ones. Enterprise architecture modelling is critical to accurately represent business and their IT assets in combination. This modelling is important when companies start to manage their enterprise architecture, but also when it is remodelled so that the enterprise architecture is realigned in a changing world. Enterprise architecture is commonly modelled by few experts in a manual way, which is error-prone and time-consuming and makes continuous realignment difficult. In contrast, other enterprise architecture modelling proposal automatically analyses some artefacts like source code, databases, services, etc. Previous automated modelling proposals focus on the analysis of individual artefacts with isolated transformations toward ArchiMate or other enterprise architecture notations and/or frameworks. We propose the usage of Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) to represent all the intermediate information retrieved from information systems’ artefacts, which is then transformed into ArchiMate models. Thus, the core contribution of this paper is the model transformation between KDM and ArchiMate metamodels. The main implication of this proposal is that ArchiMate models are automatically generated from a common knowledge repository. Thereby, the relationships between different-nature artefacts can be exploited to get more complete and accurate enterprise architecture representations.

     

企业云服务体系结构的参考模型与开发方法

服务与云计算范型的融合有助于大规模分布式软件的开发和应用,同时也为面向服务的软件工程带来了新的挑战。云计算的最大挑战是缺少事实上的标准或单一的体系结构方法,以满足企业将关键产品作为Internet上的云服务发布的应用需求。首先,针对企业云计算的业务特点,提出了一种企业云服务体系结构(Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture,ECSA)风格的通用和抽象参考模型,分析了该模型中的云服务、服务模式、服务消费者、管理、流程、质量属性、服务构件模型、服务匹配和交互模式匹配9个组件及其之间的关系,并讨论了它们中的角色。然后,提出了一个四阶段的ECSA迭代改进过程,该过程把云服务视为首要的类建模元素,通过解除云服务模型和来自目标构件配置之间的耦合,可实现相同云服务集的多种不同体系结构。最后,给出了一种基于该模型的期货程序化交易的私有云服务应用实例,用以展示该方法的可行性和有效性。     

IT Outsourcing Impacts on Enterprise Architecture

Enterprises outsource IT for many reasons, such as reducing costs, shedding of overhead functions that divert management attention away from the core business, and obtaining services from industry leaders specializing in the associated competencies. IT sourcing profoundly impacts the client organization's enterprise architecture. In an outstanding scenario, IT services come from an external services provider. Moreover, the client and vendor interact through an interorganizational interface containing operational, technical, and business components. This interface involves two major modes of interaction: delivery of the IT services and the service-management framework. The interface describes all of the processes, procedures, and protocols that the client and provider use to interact. Because enterprise architectures are unique to organizations, designing this interface might involve customization. For a large, complex client enterprise, bringing the business, operational, and technical components of the interface into alignment is often a nontrivial challenge     

A computing coordination based fuzzy group decision-making (CC-FGDM) for web service oriented architecture

As the demands for faster data processing and enterprise computing are increasing, the traditional client/server architecture has gradually been replaced by Grid computing or the peer-to-peer (P2P) model which can share the content or resources over the network. In this paper, a new computing architecture – computing power services (CPS) – has been applied to utilize web services and business process execution language for overcoming the issues about flexibility, compatibility and workflow management. CPS is a lightweight web services based computing power-sharing architecture, and suitable for enterprise computing tasks which can be executed in the batch processes within a trusty network. However, a real-time load balance and dispatching mechanism is needed for distributed-computing architecture like CPS in order to handle computing resources efficiently and properly. Therefore, a fuzzy group decision-making based adaptive collaboration design for CPS is proposed in this paper to provide the real-time computation coordination and quality of service. In this study, the approach has been applied to analyze the robustness of digital watermark by filter bank selection and the performance can be improved in the aspect of speedup, stability and processing time. This scheme increases the overall computing performance and shows stability for the dynamic environment.     

Status quo geschäftsprozessorientierter Architekturintegration

Today large companies often have to cope with complex and heterogeneous IT infrastructures. The main target of IT architects being responsible for those architectures is to align IT to business needs at the lowest costs possible. A recent approach to this issue is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Our study examines how EAI is used in large-scale companies and which effects it has on the organizational architecture of those companies. The results illustrate that EAI is a major component in complex IT infrastructures which has a significant influence on business processes. But the study also shows that there is a considerable gap between the importance of EAI in enterprise architecture and the way it is used in companies today. Eventually this article points out what has to be done to come closer to an internally sustainable enterprise architecture.     

Unternehmensarchitektur – Literaturüberblick und Stand der Praxis

Organization and management of enterprise architecture have gained increasing significance in recent years. Enterprise architecture management is based on a consistent, aggregate model of the enterprise in order to support decisions such as the design of business areas and products, corresponding business processes and organizational structures as well as application systems and infrastructure operations. Stakeholders have heterogeneous requirements concerning the views on enterprise architecture. The resulting model itself has to be manageable and has to deliver benefits. This article provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of enterprise architecture / enterprise architecture management in the literature as well as current practices in companies. In addition to a literature overview, current practices are presented based on results of an empirical study.     

面向SOA的企业服务总线研究与实现

针对企业日益增长的信息共享和业务整合的需求,面向SOA的企业服务总线屏蔽各类异构的应用从而实现基于SOA架构的企业应用集成是大势所趋。现有的面向SOA的企业服务总线（s-ESB）大多立足于提供Web服务容器,并没有提供统一的适配机制无缝集成各类企业应用,从而极大限制s-ESB的高可用性和可扩展性。首先,提出了一种新型的基于SOA架构的企业应用集成环境,从而明确了s-ESB在构建企业应用集成中的地位和作用;其次,提出了s-ESB的体系结构模型,并解决了协议适配,服务适配和公共服务等关键技术问题;最后,原型系统证明s-ESB的灵活性,可有效集成各类异构企业应用。     

自由软件的云计算观——专访自由软件之父Richard Stallman

2008年,最热门的技术话题是云计算。自Amazon的AWS (Amazon Web Services)出现以来,越来越多的人开始关注和开发这种新的计算模式。正是因为AWS的存在,Amazon视自己作科技公司,无论是其S3(Simple Storage Service)还是EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud),可以说都是开互联网云计算之先河的产品。然而,云计算到底是什么?为什么能给软件业造成这么大的影响?为什么所有的大型企业都认定云计算是未来的大势所趋?有哪些云计算存在?这些云计算的核心是什么?云计算对我们意味着什么?这些问题都值得深深地思考。     

Model-based services convergence and multi-clouds integration

With the development of cloud computing, IT users (individuals, enterprises and even public services providers) are transferring their jobs or businesses to public online services provided by professional information service companies. These information service companies provide applications as public resources to support the business operation of their customers. However, no cloud computing service vendor (CCSV) can satisfy the full functional information system requirements of its customers. As a result, its customers often have to simultaneously use services distributed in different clouds and do some connectivity jobs manually. Services convergence and multi-clouds integration will lead to new business models and trigger new integration technologies that provide solutions to satisfy IT users’ complicated requirements. This paper firstly reviews the development of cloud computing from business and technical viewpoints and then discusses requirements and challenges of services convergence and multi-clouds integrations. Thirdly, a model based architecture of multi-clouds integration is provided. Business logic modelling for cross-organizational collaboration, service modelling and operation modelling methods with relative model mapping technology are discussed in detail. Some key enabling technologies are also developed. At last, case studies are presented to illustrate the implementation of the technologies developed in the paper.     

Enterprise-Mashup-Systeme als Plattform für situative Anwendungen

Currently, several Enterprise 2.0 platforms are beginning to emerge. This paper introduces Enterprise Mashup technology as a means to improve IT alignment of individual work processes and changing business needs. Enterprise Mashups enable users to create customized applications to easily find and transform business information and functionalities, as well as collaboratively share pre-built Mashup applications. Therefore, the concept of Enterprise Mashups integrates Web 2.0 technologies and principles with well-established paradigms such as Enterprise Information Integration, Business Intelligence, and Business Process Management. Involved organizational key drivers, technical challenges and inhibitors are discussed to assess the potential business value and explain the emerging expansion of Mashup platforms in companies.     

Web-based enterprise computing

The paper considers how Web technologies have emerged as a credible alternative to client-server computing in the corporate enterprise. Web-based enterprise computing allows corporate IT to integrate disparate systems into a single, coherent environment. This shift from a traditional Web server with database connectivity to integrated systems that support the use of Web technologies facilitates business processes and allows corporations to service both internal and external customers effectively     

Implementing Java computing: Sun on architecture and applicationsdeployment

SunIR is the information technology organization within Sun Microsystems that is responsible for developing and maintaining the IT environment that supports all of Sun's business operations worldwide. This environment supports more than 20,000 employees in 180 locations in 55 countries. It currently consists of a global network with more than 3,000 subnets, 35,000 desktops, 9,000 servers and 200 internally developed distributed business applications, which are accessed by employees as well as customers, vendors and other business partners outside Sun's corporate intranet. In the process of providing the infrastructure and computer systems upon which all of Sun's business is run, SunIR also serves as a proving ground for many Sun products. We expect this architecture to continue to evolve as we learn more and as new technologies become available. We are currently working to incorporate Enterprise JavaBeans technology into this model, as we continue to build and deploy enterprise applications that support the operations of a $9 billion company     

ERP is Dead, Long Live ERP

Enterprise resource-planning (ERP) systems, relational databases, and other mature information technologies are undergoing commoditization and facing challenges from software-as-a-service (SaaS) players moving into front-end enterprise applications. Yet, such systems are likely to be around for a long time because they are reliable and have lengthy life cycles. That said, investing in disruptive markets and business models and exploring innovative technologies in high-performance computing, pervasive connectivity, Web services, and other trends will be vital if ERP vendors wish to survive well in the unfolding future.