Jim Ownby touched every point discussed in this class

The semester is quickly moving to its end, and only 2 presentations are left now. I was thinking to INTEGRATE our discussion topics and prepare a summary of the learnings of this class. But then we got this auspicious opportunity to hear our guest lecturer Mr. Jim Ownby. I observed an interesting thing in our guest lecturer's presentation, and it is that he almost touched upon every topic/aspect which we have discussed in class till date. I thought to revise you how?

1. Jim talked about the Integrated Lines of Business of BCD Travel which are "Traditional Travel Management", " Online Travel Management", "Traveler Security", "Crisis and Data management", "Incentives" and "Consulting Services". System Integration Team(Prachi, Andrew, Ben) talked about Integration Models and Styles of Integration (Data, Presentation & functional). We can relate it here that BCD had to integrate its business lines with all or some types of integration. CIS 8020 Achievers group (Asha, Jimmy and Rahul) had a presentation on ERP Systems on the same day, talking about how ERP systems are implemented to integrate these types of operating tenets and gave examples of Microsoft Dynamics and SAP. We can think that BCD Travel might also have implemented some similar kind of ERP system to integrate all the above stated business lines.

2. Then, Jim presented us with a slide where he showed us that BCD have travel partners like Sabre, Amadeus, Worldspan, Tripit etc. It is obvious that all these partners and BCD has to communicate (may be via sending messages). It reminds us of the third presentation by Mercury Group (Bill, Juhi, Gautam) where they discussed aboutMessaging Patterns and presentation by MegaHotPot (Mike, Vivian, Bing) onDatabase Oriented Middleware. If we assume that there might be message communication between BCD &its Travel Partners, certainly BCD Travel would have came across problem of integrating heterogeneous data. Its most probable that they might have thought of using Database Middle ware.

3. Jim then elaborated about BCD's IT platform selection and the technology portfolio they posses. Jim declared that all their development work is on Microsoft .NET development platform. Then they deploy SOA / Virtualized Services for solving System Integration problems. Mercury Group discussed about Service Oriented Architecture and presented some case studies. If you remember, they took example of Car Renting companies, and the same analogy applies here, where the challenge is to integrate systems of different organization. Here the scale is large and hence using SOA can safely be said "Appropriate" in this particular business situation.

BCD uses ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool for its data center management. Recall that Mike in his presenation told us about ETL tools (I remember he said some open source tools/ hand coded scripts could be executed to solve the purpose), inMegaHotSpot presentation on "Data Warehousing".

4. Our guest speaker discussed about the technical challenges which his team faces regularly. These challenges happens to be the challenges which are either discussed in every Tuesday class or are implications of System Integration.

•Reduced Maintenance Costs (TCO)

•Greater System Flexibility

•Reduced Time-to-Market

•Better interoperability

•Improved Client/Vendor accessibility/extensibility

•Improved Governance

5. On Gautam's question about "The technologies used by BCD's competitors", Jim expressed confidence that the top Travel Management Giants must be leveraging benefits of Web Services, which was the topic of Team Analyst (Ken, Veronica, David) in which they cleanly told us about how to create and publish Web Services.

6. On Sumantra's question about integrating a new partner into BCD's network, Jim threw some light on Process Integration which was our topic, "The Team CIS INTEGRATEM" where we presented our research on Process Modelling and Notations, and Team Analyst extending the discussion to BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Jim told us that its their responsibility to align the interests and come up with integration solution in the event of adding a new company tgo their business partneship network.

7. On question from Vivek Menon about the role of "Cloud Computing", which happen to be Topic of Nucleus Group (Vivek, Sangeetha, Tarun) where they presented concepts, types and pros & cons of Cloud. Jim exposed the inherent problems in this emerging technology. He complained that using Cloud Computing is like sticking yourself to a proprietary technology, because you have to develop your application around the service provider's proprietary platform. Use there language specifics / data formats to insert data into the cloud. Once you enter your data into the cloud, and if you are not satisfied and want to migrate, you do not know how to pull your whole data out in a viable format. He audaciously named it "Cloud of uncertainty" and obviously raised question from the corporate side. I feel it was enlightening, and gave me a new vision of seeing this technology.

8. In the question and answer session, Jim briefly touched upon creating RESTful services and Mash ups. My team discussed about REST architecture and its notations and its relevance with Web and Internet. Mash up was talk topic of Silk Group (Jason, Max, Dmitriy), where they presented the fundamentals of mash-ups. They also discussed about technology behind mash-ups, and presented a great demo on yahoo pipes.

So, this is how Jim Ownby, Sr. Architect of BCD Travel "integrated" all the topics of CIS 8020 and made my job easy. He really gave a practical and industrial view of seeing these technologies. Prof. Zheng has done a commendable job by inviting such a knowledgeable person for talk. I appreciate it Professor. Now, I think this Blog has become very long, so I should stop.

Thank you. Your comments are highly solicited.