Global Technology Unit (GTU)

Project Zero and WebSphere sMash: Leverage the power of Web 2.0
IBM WebSphere sMash software is a development and execution platform based on the highly acclaimed public incubator, Project Zero (hosted at projectzero.org). WebSphere sMash advances Smart SOA's simplicity and accelerates the alignment of business and IT by allowing developers to quickly and simply deliver dynamic Web 2.0 based applications, enabling mashups. This briefing will explore IBM WebSphere sMash with discussions that include Representational State Transfer (REST), an architectural style that allows services to be exposed and consumed over the Web; PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (commonly known as PHP); and Groovy, a dynamic scripting language which leverages existing Java skills. We will provide details on the features and functions of WebSphere sMash; visual assembly-style development for designing server-side business logic; and visual design editors for designing rich user interfaces.

Architecture, design, and construction using the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform
Software development is a business process. IBM recognizes that it takes many different talents to make a development project successful. Every development team has a mix of roles and responsibilities that work toward project success. The software architect and the software developer are key roles for successful software development. The architect is responsible for turning requirements into analysis and design models. The software developer is responsible for designing and implementing an executable code solution, testing the resulting components, and analyzing runtime profiles to debug errors that might exist. A software developer can also be responsible for creating the software's architecture and for employing rapid application development tools.

Future briefings to be confirmed

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Building SOA solutions and managing the service lifecycle
The briefing begins with an overview of the service management lifecycle, and continues with a detailed discussion of the implementation and management of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution. It steps through the use of IBM's world-class Rational® and WebSphere® tools for defining, modeling, and implementing new services and managing those services throughout their lifecycle. It also discusses SOA quality management and governance throughout the service lifecycle. The briefing closes with a review of SOA best practices, resources, and calls to action.

Building next-generation SOA's with SCA and SDO
Service Component Architecture provides a single interface to many different kinds of services and access methods. Service Data Objects provides a similarly elegant solution to data access. In this briefing, we'll look at the theory behind the technology, and we'll also use a sample application to illustrate the concepts behind SCA and SDO. The running code is based on the Apache Tuscany project, an open-source implementation of SCA and SDO. The underlying middleware is also open-source. You'll leave with an understanding of what these new technologies are, how they work and how they can make your organization more nimble and responsive than ever.

Future briefings to be confirmed

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IBM Rational Change and Release Management
Companies today face four major challenges for application deployment each of which can have significant business impact:

Case studies, based on the game development industry, are referenced to show how improved speed, quality, and automation of software production has been achieved through the integration of the Rational Software Delivery Platform software products.

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Eclipse: Empowering the universal platform
If you thought Eclipse was used as merely a Java development environment, then this briefing will expand your definition. Eclipse has evolved into a universal platform for anything and everything related to software development and beyond. You now have the ability to do things like geographically distributed collaboration, rich client development, and even application runtime analysis all within Eclipse. The Eclipse community is constantly working on high level projects that extend Eclipse's functionality. This briefing will take a deep dive into some of the most important and feature rich projects that the Eclipse community is developing.

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Effective software testing: Tools and strategies for project success
Shortening the time to market of new software systems without compromising their quality is a challenge that every company faces. Time-to-market pressures, building new Service-Oriented Architectures, complying with regulatory requirements, and working with geographically distributed teams add additional complexities that can derail software testing projects that aren't ready for these challenges. To meet these challenges, successful IT organizations are taking a strategic approach to quality assurance, applying the practices of business governance to achieve a competitive advantage through better software. Whether you are planning to build expertise in your IT organization, or looking for partners with testing expertise, Rational® software quality solutions and best practices can provide you with the framework and tools needed to use excellence in software testing as a strategic business advantage.

Future briefings to be confirmed

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Experience the power of Information on Demand solutions
When it comes to capitalizing on your information assets to improve business flexibility and responsiveness, IBM Information Management delivers the power of integrated information, real-time access, insightful analysis and seamless sharing of diverse and dispersed information for today's on demand business. This briefing provides an in-depth look at how Information on Demand and Information Management portfolio of leading solutions can help you meet your information needs. You will gain more insight to IBM's solutions for information integration, enterprise content management, and data servers. Learn about IBM capabilities and see competitive comparisons to Oracle and Microsoft. Live demonstrations built around real-world business scenarios demonstrate the value of Information Management software.

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Hacking 101
Few can argue that Web applications present significant threat of attacks for organizations. For IT security professionals, they also present a significant challenge. To stay ahead of hackers and protect sensitive data, security teams need to understand how vulnerabilities in applications are first exposed and then exploited by cyber-criminals for profit. In this workshop, learn first-hand the fundamentals of hacking - how to find Web application vulnerabilities through a combination of manual and automated approaches, and what to do when a vulnerability has been identified.

IBM Community Tools: Start Small to Grow Large
Today open source development tools based on open standards such as Eclipse, Apache Tomcat, and Apache Geronimo provide an attractive, robust, free of charge development environment for creating and deploying web applications. However, an alternative development environment has emerged that embraces the innovation of the open source development model while providing the stability of commercial development tools. Open Community development tools from IBM are based on the same open standards as open source tools while providing enhanced functional capabilities and broader platform support. These tools provide greater flexibility and choice for application developers by providing a free of charge development environment or an optional supported environment for a fee. This briefing explores the innovation of Open Source solutions available from IBM and illustrate the power and flexibility of an open community development environment. This discussion will provide details on the features and functions of RAD CE, WAS CE, and DB2 Express C and their integration for an robust development environment to create and deploy Web applications.

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SOA reuse and connectivity: IBM ESB without limits: A secure, reliable, and scaleable way to connect within and beyond your business
As an IT professional, you know it is becoming impossible to ignore the increasing costs impacting both budgets and growth in creating and maintaining numerous independent services that have overlapping functions. For a successful Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy, it's imperative that IT organizations can create and connect reusable assets and services faster and more efficiently, resulting in increased business flexibility as well as decreased development and maintenance costs. IBM® reuse and connectivity offerings let you create reusable services from the ground up, or from your existing assets, allowing your business to connect and integrate everything inside and outside your company. This increased flexibility enables your SOA to deliver reliability and security with high performance and high availability, spanning newly developed Web services together with complex heterogeneous environments. During this briefing, you'll get practical information and valuable next steps to enable SOA across the enterprise. Hear about various WebSphere reuse and connectivity offerings and services and how they can help you develop or extend your current strategy for SOA.

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WebSphere for SOA
Experience first hand how IBM® WebSphere® Software for SOA compares to solutions provided by BEA, Oracle, Microsoft® , and TIBCO. See live product demonstrations including real world scenarios that demonstrate the value of the IBM WebSphere software for an overall Services-Oriented Architecture. IBM experts explain how IBM can help integrate people, processes, applications and information to derive significant return on investments. They also prove that only IBM can deliver a complete end-to-end SOA solution to that of the competition.

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IBM Lotus Software: Collaboration without boundaries
Are you currently running Microsoft Exchange 2003, but struggling with reliability issues and losing the cost battle to ever-larger server farms? Are you feeling pressure to upgrade to the latest proprietary solutions, but instead want an alternative that will give you greater choice, increased flexibility, and lower costs? Have you cobbled together an e-mail system from heterogeneous parts, possibly open source, but are now looking to centralize on a proven and extensible platform? Are you comfortable with your Lotus Notes collaborative platform but now want to add unified communications and social software to further drive the productivity and innovation of your work force? This briefing addresses the "pain points" of companies from all these perspectives. Specifically, we'll compare collaboration solutions from IBM with those from Microsoft, highlighting the clear differentiators and competitive edge provided by the IBM Lotus solutions. Using both presentations and live demonstrations, we'll stress the technical advantages of IBM Lotus collaboration services, demonstrate their richness and highlight how they integrate with, enhance and enrich your current email application, be it Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.

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Managing requirements throughout the software development lifecycle
History shows that projects succeed more often when they manage requirements well. Requirements (based directly on the needs of stakeholders and the business) provide the basis for agreement with the users and the customer, and, they serve as the foundation for the work of the development team. This means that requirements provide a vital linkage to ensure that teams deliver systems that solve real business problems. This briefing highlights the role that requirements play in the development lifecycle -- from business modeling to design and test. It provides process oriented, how-to information, and explains how the IBM® Rational® tools are used to automate the process. It provides an in-depth look at the process of defining and managing requirements throughout the Software Development Lifecycle, and the IBM Rational and WebSphere tools used throughout the process. IBM Rational RequisitePro is the primary tool used to demonstrate requirements management.

Rational Business Developer Extension (EGL): An innovative rapid deployment technology
With the emergence of Web and service-oriented solutions, software development teams are faced with a growing array of middleware layers and complex interfaces that slow down the adoption of these powerful computing models and delivery of business solutions. To address this problem, IBM® Rational® has introduced a new extension to the IBM Software Delivery Platform: the Rational Business Developer Extension. Based on the Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), Rational Business Developer Extension can help you create new business applications once and then use them across platforms. It provides a simplified yet modern and powerful application and services development approach that shields developers from the technical intricacies of different platforms and middleware. The terse but powerful programming approach and the rich and productive Eclipse-based workbench help accelerate development and deliver higher quality Web and service-oriented solutions that quickly address the need of business users. Come and discover the capabilities of Rational Business Developer Extension.

Future briefings to be confirmed

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Extending Your Mainframe for More Business Value
Have you heard the latest buzz about the incredibly modern, open, user-friendly mainframe and why it's become exciting again? If you're surprised by that description then chances are you aren't reaping the many rewards that high, effective utilization of a mainframe can bring to your business today. These benefits include a much lower total cost of ownership as well as the hallmark advantages of scalability, reliability and security that are untouched by any other platform. A hot topic nowadays, and increasingly important, is the protection of data and applications from accidental disclosure or unauthorized access. As always, because it serves customers' mission-critical demands, the mainframe is way ahead of other platforms in meeting such requirements. We'll show you why the mainframe is the most secure platform and how it can act as a central security hub to manage identities, access controls and security directories. We'll also indicate how IBM's latest tools make it easy to monitor and maintain compliance with today's ever-increasing external regulation. Rounding out the day we'll discuss why the mainframe has the lowest total cost of ownership and show how you can properly establish the facts of TCO to show the true economics of computing. No prior mainframe knowledge is required as this briefing reviews the unique values of this platform as well as the latest innovations. Through presentations and live demonstrations, this full-day briefing discusses real world business issues, and how the mainframe is best equipped to solve them.

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SOA Connectivity: Implementing an ESB using WebSphere ESB
This full day workshop is intended for those currently exploring how to implement a mediation using Websphere ESB product and its capabilities. The workshop focuses on the WebSphere® Integration Developer Tooling and the IBM ® SOA Foundation. It also provides some technical overviews for background concepts but its primary goal is to provide extensive hands-on product experience through labs. During the course of the workshop you will have the opportunity to work on the following products: WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus 6.1, WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1, WebSphere Services Registry and Repository 6.1.