Are You Bullish on PaaS?

I am curious about the LANSA community and who is bullish on PaaS. It would be an interesting departure for LANSA to participate in the model. Imagine developers using free programming tools offered by LANSA to create applications and deploy them in the cloud.

This development model is radically different from traditional approaches, where programmers install commercial tools on their local systems, write code, then deploy and manage the applications on their own infrastructures. But the PaaS model is gaining traction.

There has been a flurry of activity in this area that includes:

• SAP purchase PaaS Vendor’s Intellectual Property (Coghead)
• Telcos being pulled toward PaaS (See Article)
• Predictions of IDC for Asia include: the resurrection of SaaS and the increasing adoption of Platform-as-a-Service (Paas);
• And of course Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com have had have had PaaS for some time

If you are starting to explore this model, let me know. I would enjoy chatting with others about this subject. Perhaps, we can present a model to LANSA that makes business sense for them and delivers the technology to the world.

Portal Re-development moving forward.

The Essential Enterprise Portal re-development is moving closer to a full release utilizing the Jetspeed 2 open source portal. Here is a re-cap of what is completed and underway at this stage of the re-development project:

Finished

• News Portlet re-design and conversion to JSR 168 portlet standard.


• Rippe WAM Portlet for Lansa integration converted to JSR 168 portlet standard.


• Essential Portlet application developed to contain the new applications.


• Database conversion utility built to migrate from verion 1.5 of the portal to the new database schema.


• 5250 emulation written to JSR 168 portlet standard.
  

Currently Underway

• Convert The Essential Database Browser Portlet to JSR 168 portlet standard.


• Re-design of the document repository portlet to JSR 168 portlet standard.


• Visual theme designer to be introduced in Version 2 of Essential Enterprise Portal.


• Portlet Generator to be re-designed for Version 2 of Essential Enterprise Portal.
  


• First deployment of Version 2 of the Essential Enterprise Portal is being built and targeted for our 1SYNC portal.

For more information on the Essential Enterprise Portal, send an email to Brad Gardner or visit the Rippe & Kingston Website.

Version 12. of METHOS is Released

Cincinnati, Ohio – February 2, 2009 – Rippe & Kingston Systems, Inc. With the need for greater efficiencies and cost savings high on executive agendas, superior maintenance management is emerging as a business imperative. The new release of METHOS™ significantly raises the bar in areas of Process Improvements and Integration with other systems. See Details

METHOS is 100% LANSA

Mark Mason submits LANSA for Reader's Choice Award

Below is the partial story regarding Mark Mason's submission to SystemiNetwork on January 27, 2009

Reader's Choice: LANSA

This week's nominee for reader's choice comes from Mark Mason of BuilderSolutions, Inc. Mark is such a fan of LANSA, in fact, he is a consultant that does nothing but LANSA work. He even created www.lansaclub.com. BuilderSolutions offers programming services, full service recruiting, and technical support for the IBM i, so Mark is intricately familiar with the integration of LANSA's products into our beloved system. See complete posting.

Open-Source Cloud Tools Project Spawn Cloud Foundry

For those of you addicted to everything GOOGLE, you might have seen the open-source Cloud Tools project, hosted on Google Code. It is a prime example of the emerging trend of open-source developers targeting the cloud and looking at services such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine to host their applications.

LANSA is starting to pursue Cloud Computing more aggressively. Their upcoming webinars regarding LANSA Mashups is a good example of leveraging this approach to systems. By the way...a little toot your own horn here...John Reuter from Rippe & Kingston presented LANSA Mashups at the last LANSA Conference. Way to go John...ahead of the curve as usual. John incorporated our e.ssential Portal and Contract Guardian (LANSA WAMS) as part of the mashup.

Explore LANSA Website

There is an astonishing amount of information contained within the LANSA website. Those of you reading this blog are quite familiar with all of the technical information. However, you should do a favor for some of your business colleagues and share with them why we to quote Don Nelson "Bleed Green".

The best place to get started is direct them to the following sections:

Analyst Research - Nice to know the experts agree with us.
Case Studies - One can find inspiring stories about every industry.
Webinar Recordings - On demand presentations are great. Especially when you have people like Dave Brault presenting.

Next Step: Direct them to your LANSA Representative or LANSA Business Partner

LANSA & Cloud Computing Reliability

This is really an issue of the general reliability of the cloud vs LANSA specifically. It has been my first hand experience with Salesforce.com that the reliability has been quite good---not perfect. (Our internal infrastructure is not perfect either)

I do anticipate improvement in the reliability of the cloud systems. In fact, you will note that broadband infrastructure enhancement in the United States is a significant part of the new stimulus package that President Elect Barack Obama presented on December 6th, 2008.

However, if you need a system that absolutely never never can be unavailable...it will be a long time coming before the Cloud can deliver that degree of dependability. That being a given, from what I have seen from a broad range of LANSA based applications being delivered as SaaS offering, even now, the reliability is good enough for corporate applications. Now more than ever, LANSA and LANSA focused developers/firms will benefit as this world of cloud computing expands.