IBM WebSphere Birthday

IBM WAS Feature Pack for Web 2.0: (Video Script)

BRETT We stay pretty busy around here. We make snowboards in July and sell climbing gear at Christmas. We know what it takes to ride the double diamond at Crested Butte or climb Mt. Everest. Our business needs to be just as flexible and agile as our customers gear.

BRETT So the technology that runs our business needs to flexible and agile too. We depend on the assets of our partners & suppliers, so we need to be integrated world-wide. That’s where the IBM Websphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 comes in, harnessing the combined power of Web 2.0 and our SOA. SOA and Web 2.0 means that we bring all our most important services to the forefront – in an application that gives us immediate insight and interaction with customers, partners, suppliers & retailers. And all the while keeping the customer updated and reacting to any changes they might make.

KRISTI Brett, it’s starting to dump snow all over Canada. Like, a serious blizzard!

BRETT This is an important moment right here. In the past, this information didn’t mean a lot to us. Sure, big snow means big business for our snowsports products – but how could we know how much business? Or from where? We were always trying to play catch up. You know, let me show you how it used to happen in the past.

KRISTI Brett, we’re getting hammered! That snowstorm up north has tripled the number of orders we’re getting in. We need to be shipping a thousand custom boards by the end of the week, and the roads to all our binding suppliers, they’re are all closed!

BRETT Now watch closely.

BRETT We had to contact all of our partners by phone or email, trying in vain to get a hold of the right people on the other end. Our customers didn’t know what was going on, and half the time, neither did we! By only reacting rather than anticipating, we ran around like a bunch of…well, you can see for yourself. Let’s go back to the present, shall we?

BRETT Now, it’s a whole new world. Our WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 has enabled us to leverage our partners, customers, and suppliers. Web 2.0 and SOA is the ultimate mash-up. Let me show you why.

BRETT So we know, for example, that a snowstorm up north will increase our snow sports sales by 300% and our arctic camping sales by 75% over the next month, especially in our northern markets. We can watch the weather around our suppliers, and make sure that they are open and ready to handle the boom. Now we’re ahead of the game.

BRETT I can view all the customer, partner and supplier data in one place. For instance, I can see that out of my 3 binding suppliers, one is out of the bindings we need, and one is too busy to accept new work. So off the information goes to the third vendor.

BRETT Or, I can look closer at one of our stores in the area hit hardest by the blizzard. I can watch ski resort activity to predict customer demand, watch the weather and the sales for that location, while chatting in real time with a store manager and line director, so everything continues to run smoothly.

BRETT These kinds of features wouldn’t have been available in the past – it takes the WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 to build this type of custom application, which brings together the awesome power of SOA and Web 2.0, leveraging our customers, partners and suppliers in one place.

BRETT A custom order just came in. Let me show you how WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 has made every step smoother and easier for this order and all the millions of others we get.

BRETT Taryn needed a new snowboard, so she connected with us, direct from the slopes – just like millions do, everyday. And already, our WebSphere Feature Pack for Web 2.0 is working for us.

BRETT Our website allows our customers access to the things they care about most – snow, equipment, friends, and competition. And all this is connected with our back-end applications in real-time like our inventory database and package tracking. Taryn can check on that blizzard in Canada, order the snowboard she needs, look up her competition in our custom-designed snow wiki, map her trip, and the trip of her snowboard as it travels to her. And thanks to our Feature Pack for Web 2.0, we knew she would need that board before she did.

BRETT Taryn picked a cool board, a cool color and even a custom graphic– right on our site. The Feature Pack for Web 2.0 puts our business in the center of customers, partners & suppliers, and makes sure that she gets what she wants, when she wants it.

BRETT I can then coordinate the shipping with our shipping company and Taryn can track the package as it makes its way to Fragile…er, uh, Canada.

TARYN Sweet.

BRETT By combining the power of SOA and Web 2.0, we’ve increased productivity, reduced mistakes, increased profits, and provided our customers with the best possible experience. Stop playing catch up and start making serenity a part of your business.

BRETT IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0. Ready for change? IBM is ready when you are. To learn more visit ibm.com/websphere/was .

IBM WebSphere & SOA for SMB (Video Script)

Hey there. If you’re a small or medium business, you face some unique challenges. Believe me, I know. I am the sales operation manager here at Topsail Surf, a surf and skate equipment store. We’re very pleased that our business is growing - we can now sell online and ship around the world!

This kind of global presence is great for our business and our brand image, but it also means that we have to provide our service 24-7. Day or night, anywhere in the world, our products need to be available. When our European customers are asleep, our Asia-Pacific customers are wide awake, surfing the web, so they can surf the waves. And we need to be there for all of them.

It is vitally important to Topsail Surf that we provide a great shopping experience for our customers – in the store, on the phone, or on our website. We can’t afford bad experiences, because first impressions count and we depend on repeat business. So customer loyalty is key, and we’ve got to provide them with an experience that helps that loyalty grow.

While our customers depend on us to accurately process their orders in a timely fashion, our company depends on our technology and information infrastructure to be reliable. I mean, just imagine what would happen if the information in our purchasing application couldn’t exchange data with our sales order processing! Or if our product catalog couldn’t link with the website. Our IT team knows that unavailability of any our systems and poor linkage with our suppliers and warehouse will cost us money. And dissatisfied customers could lose us business, fast. In fact there are reports that show that 25% of companies which experienced an IT outage of two to six days went bankrupt almost immediately.. And we know some other businesses that have closed due to..well, let’s say “audit irregularities”.

As you can see, having everything connected together properly, never losing any data or transactions, and providing an excellent end-user experience is key if we want to continue to grow and succeed. That’s a lot of things to think about.

CHAPTER 2

But our IT team told me why I didn’t need to worry. Our smaller business can play right alongside the big guys, because we have the might of IBM Software behind us. That’s right, IBM’s software offerings for Small and Medium business can give us the same kind of tools that much larger companies have, and with that help we can succeed. Our IT team uses the two core IBM WebSphere products: WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Application Server. This means that our IT team can make the most of the skills they have, in order to build our solutions and leverage our Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA, to make it flexible – and to be a lot more responsive to changing customer or management demands. In this highly competitive, consumer-lead market, we have to stay agile, stay one step ahead. So our solutions have to be turned around fast. We mostly use PC-based solutions, so the software needs to be quick and simple to install, configure, and use.

And it is! WebSphere MQ installs in a matter of minutes, comes with loads of sample code, and a sample application to get us up and running quickly. MQ, as they call it, allows us to integrate all of our applications and data together, no matter what platforms or programming languages are used. It provides assured and reliable delivery of information between applications, and every transaction or movement of data can be logged – so we know that if we ever need to prove what happened, when, who or what was involved, all the data can be kept for audit and analysis. MQ connects anything to everything – all the hardware and operating systems we have, or are likely to have, and it has interfaces in every programming language we could possibly need, from Java and C to COBOL and even Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX. So if our company continues to evolve and we grow by acquisition, we can be confident that we will easily integrate other technology investments.

But for now, our IT team likes to keep things simple. They tell me that Web 2.0, with its REST-based services, makes life much easier. And in fact, our Web 2.0 developer didn’t even have to know anything about MQ. It’s just there, under the covers, doing what it does. Delivering information reliably, with transactional integrity. So even if an application fails, the other applications will keep on working, and we don’t lose any data.

With our new major contract with a chain of department stores, business has tripled on some of our products. But with MQ we didn’t have to change a thing. It has scalability and resilience build in – our IT team calls it “clustering”.

CHAPTER 3

The team also uses WebSphere Application Server, which is the leading application server foundation for SOA. You know, companies can spend huge amounts of time and money to get the type of features and services that we got quickly and painlessly through Websphere Application Server. And with the WebSphere Application Server Feature Packs that came free with Websphere Application Server 6.1, we gained access to the latest innovation and open standards support. In short, Feature Packs give you simple access to robust features. There are three Feature Packs today –WAS 6.1 Feature Pack for EJB3, Web Services, and Web 2.0. The team used the Feature Packs for Web Services to simplify web services development and interoperability. It was easy to start because the Feature Pack came with sample applications that run in multiple IT environments, including .NET and Java. Next, the Feature Pack for Web 2.0 took us to a whole new level by enabling us leverage our SOA - supplier, customer, and partner assets working together - in a single, powerful, and flexible application. This allowed our team to use our existing assets in ways they had never imagined, and to effortlessly derive value from data that was previously relegated to a back-end data center.

All of these Feature Packs allowed our team to quickly consume the latest application server technology, and escape the unending cycle of 12-to-24 month releases. With the WebSphere Application Server Feature Packs, we can take advantage of new features while maintaining a more stable internal release cycle.

Chapter 4

With these great solutions in place, IT can easily take care of the technology side of things, providing me with the flexibility to make changes to how we do business, or who we do it with. I can extend our product line, and provide our customers with an always-on business, ready to adapt to our customers’ needs and to new market opportunities.

You know, I really don’t know how we would have managed without our WebSphere products. We are ready to move forward, feeling secure in our business and our future. And even though we are still growing, we can get out in the ocean and compete with the big fish. And even with business booming, there’s still time to test our equipment. Gotta go, surf’s up!

You’ve seen the demo, now click the link to learn more.

CICS: Transaction Server (Video description)

The video is about the new CICS V3.2 Transaction Server

Putting the “S” in SOA. IBM Hursley House is the home of CICS development since 1973. Billions of people use CICS every day. CICS is four letters top businesses swear by. CICS delivers availability, reliability, manageability, and scaleability. CICS is built on the mainframe platform and CICS and system z are an unbeatable combination. For more information on the new version of CICS go to the website. http://www.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/tserver/v32/

IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise Video: (Video Script)

It’s a familiar challenge for all businesses - doing more with less … like…

… funding new growth initiatives with no extra budget

… reducing operational and energy costs while maintaining or improving all service levels

… or deploying new applications to respond quickly to business needs

And all of these major demands coincide with management and energy costs growing faster than ever. CIOs and IT managers must juggle these often competing demands, while new balls are being thrown into the mix.

Typically, companies solved this by purchasing new hardware servers. But when energy and operating costs are increasing rapidly, purchasing new hardware is often not an option … and virtualizing hardware servers alone won’t always solve the problem.

Until now, hardware servers, storage, and the network have been virtualized. This can bring initial cost savings. …

… but now a new virtualization approach is needed to bring cost savings, flexibility, and agility to enterprise applications and an SOA environment.

Application Infrastructure Virtualization is a significant new development with all these benefits.

It separates enterprise applications from the underlying infrastructure. Workloads run across a pool of application server resources, allowing the infrastructure to respond dynamically … by managing and shifting workloads according to your business policies. Your critical applications will always have the resources they need.

The IBM solution for application infrastructure virtualization is WebSphere Virtual Enterprise…

It delivers benefits in three ways:

It lowers operational and energy costs needed to create, run, and manage your enterprise applications and SOA environment.

It delivers greater infrastructure flexibility and agility to ensure responsiveness. …

… It automatically provides capacity for new applications or services, and dynamically routes resources where they are needed most.

And it improves service and increases application availability by better managing application health.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise can greatly reduce unplanned outages by as much as 98% to as little as 5 minutes per year! In addition, it can greatly improve quality of service by delivering maintenance cost savings of 45 – 55% on average.

It can give your application infrastructure the flexibility and agility your business needs; and the savings that your budget demands.

Conduct a value assessment today to determine the financial and operational benefits of using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise.

Contact your local IBM representative, or visit ibm.com to find out more.

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (Video Script)

MALE SPEAKER: Connecting all these applications and services is no picnic. I mean, there are transport protocols and data formats to consider and the connectivity logic can keep an IT team awake at night. And replacing a service? What a nightmare. I don't even want to think about that.

But thanks to IBM Enterprise Service Bus product portfolio, I don't have to. The ESB is central to your Service-Oriented Architecture -- or, SOA -- providing flexible, intelligent connectivity between all parts of the business. Reaping the benefits of SOA depends on the efficient communication between people, applications, data, services and hardware.

Now for the sake of this demo, I play the part of Chief Technology Officer for JK Enterprises. We create medical software here at JK and my IT team is responsible for maintaining systems used by our technical support reps, sales team and developers, as well as our CRM and back end business intelligence applications. And did I mention that all of this needs to work together?

Now, our customers submit tickets for technical support through our Web portal, which needs access to data from the CRM and bug tracking tools used by the developers.

When we were overloaded or offline, help tickets came through incomplete forcing our technical support staff to spend extra time filling in the blanks. Increased response time led to decreased customer satisfaction.

The sales team needs their CRM and sales tools available onsite and remotely. And the business team demands real-time information on sales performance, product development, technical support, statistics and everything in between.

Our resources were stretched to the limit trying to maintain all the connections. Adding or removing an application or service caused weeks of headaches as we disconnected and reconnected the disparate systems.

The IBM Enterprise Service Bus changed all that. You see, IBM enables us to build a smart SOA with three ESB offerings to meet our exact connectivity requirements. We have the freedom to implement a comprehensive ESB to start, as well as incorporate other IBM solutions as our needs expand.

Our ESB acts as a universal connectivity layer between our systems managing the communication flow and providing the necessary flexibility and responsiveness to meet our business needs. Because the IBM ESB supports open standards, it was easy to integrate existing applications and even add new ones.

IBM offers three different ESBs to meet the needs of various IT architectures. WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus is optimized with WebSphere Application Server for an integrated SOA platform.

WebSphere Message Broker is a platform independent ESB built for universal connectivity and transformation in heterogeneous IT environments. The WebSphere Data Power Integration Appliance XI50 is a purpose built hardware ESB engineered for simplified deployment and hardened security.

These ESB products can be used separately or together to meet your business' specialized requirements in many different situations: departmental, branch office or enterprise scenarios.

And with our ESB products in place, we know that our process integrity is intact. We now have the ability to conduct business in a secure, scalable SOA environment that features seamless synchronization.

Remember those customer support tickets that used to come through incomplete? No? that's just one problem that's long gone now that we've implemented a smart SOA with ESB.

Now, our IBM Enterprise Service Bus allows all our disparate systems and protocols to work together effectively eliminating the downtime and errors that plagued us in the past. And, decreasing response time has done wonders for our customer satisfaction.

The IBM Enterprise Service Bus product portfolio can do wonders for your business as well. Powering your smart SOA with the IBM ESB gives you the flexible connectivity and responsiveness you need. No matter what your business scenario is or how complex your IT situation has become, the IBM ESB can help.

So if your IT nightmare is keeping you awake at night, it's time get on the business: the Enterprise Service Bus from IBM and find out how smart SOA with an ESB can help you leave the nightmare behind. You've seen the demo, now click the link to learn more.