In one of the announcement's on the IBM Cognos proposed acquisition, there was a reference to SOABI (the merging of SOA and BI) as a possible implementation in a DataPower appliance
"There are potentially a number of interesting potential synergies from this deal, aside from the fact that it fills the BI hole in IBM's information management strategy. For instance, the Applix TM/1 technology itself could be spun along a parallel entry level path aimed at SMBs that could package this memory-resident, 64-bit, distributed OLAP analytics offering inside an IBM DataPower appliance."Gary Smith at SOA Network Architect first noted this unique suggestion for an appliance product roadmap.
At IBM (caveatted with my blog's disclaimer footnote) I have the opportunity of working with DataPower. As an appliance, it processes XML (transformation, translation, routing) much faster than any software based engine, it has excellent security capabilities (including WS-Security) and is hardened so that it can reside safely in the DMZ. It is the best way I know of to secure your ESB on the edge.
It is interesting that this appliance is a software offering specifically under the WebSphere brand. There is reason for this as DataPower straddles the network infrastructure and application infrastructure reference architecture, and it is the application space where the DataPower appliance augments the application integration layer, for which WebSphere has the bulk of IBM's offerings.
The market can still get confused with where the boundaries of software augmentation ends and where the hardware/firmware framework dictates the scope of what the appliance is designed for. The DataPower appliance shines with a well thought out design, but what makes it really competitive is what it's firmware is dedicated to (XML and security). The Blue colored XI50 is augmented with WebSphere MQ, Tivoli, and TIBCO clients, but for the reason of helping the device slot in more seamlessly into an ESB infrastructure. It is not a product roadmap which leads to more and more application layers added on in order to create yet another hardware/application "thing" which is taken out of it's crate and does something after plugging it in. The DataPower appliance was built from the ground up to solve very specific problems, and to burden it with bloating functionality which provides a declining scale of incremental functionality with each new layer, would not be a good thing.
That said, there IS something to having an out of the box appliance which is architected, designed, and built from the ground up with modularized off the shelf hardware and software components, and finished off with specialized firmware implementations and other niceties like hardening, which makes it a first class appliance which bolts into an existing infrastructure. Something which could, for example, dedicate itself to specialized functions such as SOABI. This concept extends the SOA software framework where adaptability, flexibility, and time to market are paramount. Dropping in significant functionality without extensive configuration, integration effort, deployment effort, is a nice addition to anyone's future SOA infrastructure.
Oh, and to put a ribbon and bow on such future appliances, how about building them to BladeCenter specs, and slotting them into Blue Cloud for On Demand computing. Interested players in this concept, please Digg here!!
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