Exclusive Interview with

Eric Newcomer

CTO, IONA Technologies.

  Read the 1st interview [April 2005] with Eric on ESB etc.

In this 2nd interview Eric expands upon the Artix/ESB theme articulated in the first interview and explains how IONA's ESB stacks up against BEA's ESB and also provides us with some illuminating insights into their open-source Celtix initiative.

IONA Technologies [www.iona.com], with revenues of $68M in 2004, was a pioneer in standards-based software integration with its Orbix family of products.  Founded in 1991, on the campus of Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland), IONA, now with over 350 employees worldwide, prides itself as a leader in enterprise IT integration – spending the last decade tackling some of the world’s toughest enterprise IT integration projects, most notably in the financial and telecommunication sectors.  IONA sets out to drive down the cost and complexity of enterprise IT through a synergistic blend of superior technical expertise and incisive software offerings.  Thus, according to IONA, 70% of the financial services organizations in the Fortune Global 100 rely on IONA's software, as do 80% of the world’s largest telecommunications companies.  With credentials such as these IONA is a unique position to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of SOA-based solution.

IONA’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product family, which runs natively on all major integration platforms of import including IBM mainframes, is known as Artix.  IONA’s ESB offering, easily extensible thanks to a standards-based architecture that encourages ‘plug-ins’, is meant to adroitly address the manifold challenges of complex, mission-critical IT integration projects.  With Artix 3.0, the latest version of the company’s extensible ESB, IONA intends to dominate the enterprise SOA arena – particularly when it comes to customers with IBM mainframe applications.

Eric Newcomer, the CTO of IONA, is here interviewed by Anura Guruge, the editor at large for IT In-Depth to find out how and why Artix differs from other offerings on the market – and to get some insights as to how IONA feels XML Web services-based IT integration vis-à-vis what is possible with CORBA and Orbix.

ERIC NEWCOMER

In his role as Chief Technology Officer at IONA, Mr. Newcomer is responsible for directing and communicating IONA's technology roadmap, as well as IONA's product strategy as it relates to standards adoption, architecture, and design.

Mr. Newcomer joined IONA in November 1999, after nearly 16 years at Digital/Compaq, where he held a variety of technical and management roles. He joined IONA as the company's transaction processing architect, and also served as IONA's Vice President of Engineering, Web Services Integration Products.

Mr. Newcomer leads IONA's participation in all standardization activities, and has been involved in Web services standardization activities from the beginning. He was a founding member of the XML Protocols Working Group at W3C, which produced SOAP 1.2. He is also a former editor of the Web Services Architecture specification at the W3C and is IONA's primary representative to OASIS and WS-I. Mr. Newcomer is co-author and editor of the recently published Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) set of specifications and co-chair of the WS-CAF technical committee at OASIS.

A frequent speaker at industry and company events and contributor to popular journals and Web sites, Mr. Newcomer is the author of the best-selling Understanding Web Services (published in May 2002 by Addison-Wesley), and co-author with Phil Bernstein of Principles of Transaction Processing (published in January 1997 by Morgan Kaufman). His new book, Understanding SOA with Web Services, written with Greg Lomow, was published by Addison Wesley in December 2004.

Q1: Eric, since our last interview in late March, there has been a number of high-profile mergers and acquisitions in the host integration field in addition to NEON’s acquisition of ClientSoft in December.  Without going into specifics and mentioning names, unless, of course you want to do so, can you please tell us how Artix will continue to prevail and provide unique value to customers against this new competitive backdrop?

 A1: Well the unique value of Artix really hasn’t changed.  As you know, the mainframe market for Web services is very broad, and not very deep in some places.  You have a wide variety of deployed applications, some dating back 30 years or more, and a wide variety of solutions, some of which pertain to only a small fraction of those applications.  Artix remains unique in performance and in its capabilities to Web service enable both CICS and IMS transactions, to generate COBOL and PL/I code from WSDL contracts, and to service enable 3270 data streams. No other host based Web services integration product can boast all of these features.

 Q2: Eric, BEA with their recently unveiled AquaLogic is also promoting an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) approach that sounds somewhat akin to what IONA has been pushing with Artix.  Can you please share with us how you think the IONA Artix approach stacks up against what BEA is talking about?’

 A2: Yes, it certainly appears that BEA is including an ESB component within their AquaLogic program.  However, we do not see anything that really distinguishes that ESB from the other MOM-based ESBs out there on the market, like Sonic or Fiorano.  We did not notice any mainframe component to it, or any mobile device component, for that matter.  In fact we would question whether a MOM-based product is really an ESB at all. What’s really needed is a virtual bus architecture that is neutral to transport protocol and data format and can therefore fit better within existing IT environments.  For that reason Artix supports a variety of formats and protocols out of the box, and includes a plug in developers’ kit for additional or custom format and protocol support.  And unlike those other ESBs, Artix also includes a service enablement capability for legacy environments so that customers can use a single environment to define, deploy, manage, and update services they connect into an SOA.

Q3: Eric, most of us involved in EAI/Host integration have an intuitive idea as to what a “composite application server” would do vis-à-vis SOA-based composite applications when it comes to security, process management etc.  Would you say that an ESB is just another term for a composite application server or is an ESB a superset or subset of a composite application server?

 A3: I'd say that an ESB includes many of the features of a composite application server since it has its own runtime and includes many of the same qualities of service, such as security, transactions, high availability, and so on.  But an ESB is not the same thing as a composite application server since an ESB is focused on adding just the right amount of software necessary to “standardize” existing applications.  An ESB is a non-intrusive way to service enable and connect together existing applications.  In many cases, an ESB can function as part of the existing application through adding ESB functional libraries to the existing application.  In other cases, the ESB can function as a lightweight gateway on the server side, client side, or both.  The point is to standardize access to existing applications through Web services interfaces, and standardize interoperability among existing applications through the use of SOAP and other transport protocols, transparently bridging them when necessary.

Q4: Eric, lets now please talk about Celtix the open source, Java ESB sponsored by IONA and hosted in the ObjectWeb community.  Will the Artix ESB be based on Celtix, say by mid-2006, once Celtix is relatively mature?

 A4: We see Celtix as a separate and distinct project, and we think Celtix and Artix serve different parts of the ESB market.  We do not have any plans at this point to include Celtix code within Artix, although the two are likely to share some code, especially around the GUI functions.  Celtix is targeted at the entry level or commodity level ESB market, and we expect customers to use it as a good way to get started with SOA infrastructure.  We expect Celtix to help drive the adoption in general of SOA infrastructure and that some number of customers who use Celtix will either want to migrate to Artix or use Artix in addition to Celtix when they encounter project requirements for high performance, multi language support, legacy protocols and format compatibility, and so on.

Q5: Eric, is Celtix meant to be a generous altruistic gesture by IONA or are there some market and competitive advantages that IONA intends to gain with Celtix?

 A5: Celtix absolutely represents a new line of business for IONA and an opportunity for a new source of additional revenue.  We believe that the open source business model provides several opportunities for us to leverage our services department in new ways, meaning providing support, training, and architectural consulting for Celtix for end users and ISVs interested in embedding Celtix in their products.  Because of the plug-in architecture compatibility across Celtix and Artix, we also expect to sell some Artix plug-ins to Celtix customers as an additional source of revenue from the Celtix project.

Q6: Eric, as my last question for this interview, can I ask you whether IONA has any plans for a .NET equivalent of Celtix given that we hear that just over 50% of SOA-based initiatives are likely to be implemented using .NET methodologies.

 A6: No, our plan would be to expand our current .NET Connector product line to include more and more features and improve the level of interoperability we already provide for .NET.  Our focus with Artix is on connecting mainstream platforms such as NET . and J2EE with existing applications, including legacy protocols and formats, by service enabling them and allowing existing IT assets to play well in the SOA environment.  Our approach to .NET is to provide the best in class interoperability between .NET and the mainframe, for example, and we will continue to invest in that.

Thank you very much Eric.

Eric, I have to say that this was a great interview.  You are so crisp, precise and emphatic.  It is such a pleasure.  Your first interview remains a perennial favorite and I see people reading it everyday.  This update is just dynamite.  I can't thank you enough.  I wish you the best of luck and I hope you will be gracious enough to grant me another interview in the Fall.  Thank YOU.

 Read the 1st interview [April 2005] with Eric on ESB etc.