WUG News and Updates

Upcoming WUG Meetings

• August 31: Lawrence/Topeka WebSphere User Group
• August 31: RioWUG — Rio de Janeiro WebSphere User Group
• September 13: Detroit WebSphere User Group
• September 13: Swiss WebSphere User Group
• September 14: West Michigan WebSphere Users Group

Congratulations to our 2Q 2011 GWC Member Rewards Winner: Ahmed Abdel Monsef
Congratulations to GWC member Ahmed Abdel Monsef  on winning the GWC Member Rewards contest for 2Q 2011!

Ahmed earned the most Loyalty Points in 2Q 2011 by providing resourceful answers in the GWC forums that resolved several member issues. He will receive an IBM WebSphere Education course in return for his contributions to the Global WebSphere Community. Congratulations to Ahmed, and thank you for your contributions to the Global WebSphere Community.

You too can earn valuable WebSphere Education Rewards.  The GWC Member Rewards Program is designed to give back to our highest contributing Global WebSphere Community Members. You earn points in the Global WebSphere Community based on your activity and contribution to the Community. Points are earned and accrued when contributing to the GWC blogs, uploading a presentation, providing responses in the GWC Forms, and more.  For more details and a listing of activities and points you can earn when contributing to the Global WebSphere Community, please visit our GWC Member Rewards Program page.

Congratulations to Our GWC Member Survey Winner!
We received a lot of great feedback from our GWC Member Survey last month that we'll use to continue to improve the Web site.  Congratulations to Devin Richards, who won the GWC Member Survey drawing! Thanks to everyone who took time to give us feedback in the survey.

The GWC Announces the Launch of Two New WUGs:

BPM in Growth Markets
BPM in Growth Markets is a user group for IBM BPM professionals in the Growth Markets to capitalize on collective capabilities and successes in the BPMS and Decision Management space.

Please direct questions group owner Supriya Suriyanarayanan by clicking on the Contact Group Owner link on the BPM in Growth Markets WUG page.

To join the BPM in Growth Markets User Group, you must be a member of the Global WebSphere Community.  If you are not already a member, you can sign up for your free account by visiting www.websphereusergroup.org and clicking on the Join link in the upper right-hand corner. After you have signed up, go to the BPM in Growth Markets WUG page and click the Join This Group link under the group profile picture on the right (you must be logged in to your GWC account to complete this step).

WebSphere DevOps Automation
WebSphere DevOps Automation is a virtual group focused on automating WebSphere administration to support application releases, change management and compliance auditing/reporting. DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for collaboration between software development and IT operations.  Many business critical, web-based applications are deployed on WebSphere. Automation is the key to delivering applications faster, with fewer errors and at the lowest cost.

Please direct questions group owner Jody Hunt by clicking on the Contact Group Owner link on the WebSphere DevOps Automation WUG page.

To join the WebSphere DevOps Automation User Group, you must be a member of the Global WebSphere Community.  If you are not already a member, you can sign up for your free account by visiting www.websphereusergroup.org and clicking on the Join link in the upper right-hand corner. After you have signed up, go to the WebSphere DevOps Automation WUG page and click the Join This Group link under the group profile picture on the right (you must be logged in to your GWC account to complete this step).

The GWC Announces the Re-Launch of DFWUG — WebSphere Users Group do Distrito Federal
DFWUG encourages the exchange of experiences and knowledge among its members by promoting events, workshops and courses. DFWUG’s main goal is to improve the quality of software projects developed by its members, helping them to fully and correctly use the WebSphere platform.

Please direct questions group owner Marcelo Ancelmo by clicking on the Contact Group Owner link on the DFWUG page.

To join the WebSphere Users Group do Distrito Federal, you must be a member of the Global WebSphere Community.  If you are not already a member, you can sign up for your free account by visiting www.websphereusergroup.org and clicking on the Join link in the upper right-hand corner. After you have signed up, go to the DFWUG page and click the Join This Group link under the group profile picture on the right (you must be logged in to your GWC account to complete this step).

Save the Date: September 28 GWC Lab Chat with Brian Martin on Basic Scaling Solutions
Please plan to join us at 11:00 am ET (GMT -4) as Brian Martin leads a discussion on basic scaling solutions.  Abstract and registration details to follow soon!

Highlights from the August Blogs:

• Tainted spinach and the application supply chain
• WCUG Aug Meeting - WebSphere Commerce Web Services
• WebSphere FAQs... you don't ask because they might think you don't know basics : Part-4 [from IBM DeveloperWorks]
• Websphere Service Registry Tool - Service Registry Manager
• WMQ v7 and WAS v6 &v7 connectivity issues
• The invisible threat
• BPM for Dummies: Jump into BPM with IBM tools
• WebSphere Application Server v7 Oracle WebLogic 11g
• 64-bit Performance Demystified
• WebSphere costs 57.7% less than WebLogic .. and compare more facts
• It's been a bit... sorry.
• WAS Synchronization Problems
• WebSphere FAQs... you don't ask because they might think you don't know basics : Part-3
• Did you know WebSphere BPs can apply for marketing support funding?
• Did you know WebSphere BPs can be eligible for campaign support funding?
• 5 reasons IT marketers may want to start a forum
• WCUG July Meeting - Feature Pack 3 Overview - Session recording available now

Recap: August 2011 Monthly Focus: Integrating Your Business in the Cloud with IBM WebSphere

Date: August 4, 2011
Title: Every Cloud Needs an SOA Lining: Architecting SOA for Cloud Success
Time: 11:00 AM EDT (GMT -4)

Watch the video replay and download the presentation

A recent IDC Cloud survey revealed the top two technologies to support Cloud success were web services and SOA: "Given the flexibility, configurability, scalability, extensibility, and maintainability required of cloud services, SOA is currently the best architecture for ensuring that these needs are met."

Join us for this webinar to learn how to answer the following questions and more:

• Why does the infrastructure matter from a business perspective?
• What non-functional characteristics are important?
• How can your infrastructure deliver high RAS?
• How are mixed workload solutions handled?
• How can variability in workload demand be addressed?

Date:  August 11, 2011
Topic: Securing and Connecting the Cloud; Insider Tips on Successful Cloud Adoption Strategies
Time:  11:00 AM EDT (GMT -4)

Watch the video replay, download the presentation, and view questions from the webcast in the Cloud Computing forum

Today’s organizations are rapidly adopting Cloud or SaaS applications due to the many potential benefits, such as reduced  costs in licensing and maintenance, as well as increased user adoption and IT agility. Yet factors such as security, integration, and user adoption are among many considerations which are key to a successful Cloud adoption models. In this webinar, you will hear from technology experts and learn how best practices, fit-for-purpose solutions and  trends in cloud computing can empower your organization to successfully adopt and deploy your Cloud strategy.

Date:  August 25, 2011
Topic: Smart and Secure Hybrid Cloud Integration
Time:  11:00 AM EDT (GMT -4)

Watch the video replay, download the presentation, and view questions from the webcast in our Cloud Computing forum

As enterprises increasingly make use of cloud-based resources and applications, in the form of private clouds on-premise and public clouds off-premise, they are facing a variety of challenges to connecting resources and applications in clouds and traditional deployments. The Cast Iron product family is already addressing a number of those challenges today. In this session, we will discuss the many facets of Hybrid Cloud Integration and provide a snapshot of ongoing work to address them in an effort between WebSphere and Tivoli. Topics discussed will include policy-based workload provisioning, unified workload monitoring, data leakage prevention, high availability, cloud metering, cloud billing and client controlled cloud security.

Recap: August 17, 2011 GWC Lab Chat with Dr. Adolfo Rodriguez: Challenges and Trends In Service-Oriented Networking

Watch the video replay, download the presentation, and view the questions from the webcast in the WebSphere DataPower forum

The increased complexity and demands of business-critical applications coupled with the dynamic nature of a rapidly evolving business climate have led to a new genre of IT computing called service-oriented networking.  In this environment, network-resident devices operate on layer 4-7 content and protocols to route, modify, secure, or optimize traffic as it progresses through the network.  While the topological vantage points of client-side, server edge, intranet, and data center locations enable convenient places to perform application- and service-rich functions, such capabilities come with many challenges.  In this discussion, we will focus on the emerging trends in this landscape and survey the challenges (with possible solutions) associated with them.

Interested in Becoming a GWC Business Partner?
The Global WebSphere Community reaches tens of thousands of WebSphere professionals every month – the GWC Partner Program allows companies to get their message to decision makers in the community that they may otherwise not have the opportunity to reach. “When we want to send a targeted message specifically to people working in the WebSphere platform, the GWC Partner Program makes that happen for us”, says XebiaLabs CEO Coert Baart, a recent GWC Partner Program participant. He added, “A recent email sent to the community on our behalf resulted in dozens of new leads overnight.”

The GWC Partner Program delivers value far beyond simple advertising. They work as an advisor helping partners choose the right mix of sponsored articles, white papers and webinars that are likely to deliver the desired outcome to partners in terms of brand recognition and lead generation.

To learn how the GWC Business Partner Program can help you deliver targeted messages to WebSphere professionals, contact Scott Treggiari at scott.treggiari@wispubs.com or 1-781-751-8734.

WebSphere News and Announcements

Enhanced IBM Software Support Lifecycle Policy Helps You Get the Most Value From Your Software Investments
The IBM Software Support lifecycle policy has been enhanced to respond to client requests for more flexibility and more support options.  For details, visit: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/passportadvantage/supportlifecycleextended.html

WebSphere DataPower Appliance HSM Feature with WebSphere DataPower Firmware V4.0.2
WebSphere DataPower Appliance HSM feature with WebSphere DataPower firmware V4.0.2 provides enhanced protection of cryptographic keys compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2.

Planned availability date: September 12, 2011

Business Process Optimization Accelerators
The Business Process Optimization team continues to develop Accelerators, which are: 

• Coded assets that integrate specific middleware capability in the BPO reference model targeted at solving an industry-specific pain point
• Based on a combined opportunistic and strategic approach
• Incubated to market needs with intent of transitioning to more formal offerings

Click here to find out additional information on the following six Accelerator links: 

• IBM Promotional Spend Compliance Accelerator For Life Sciences
• IBM Campaigns and Promotions Accelerator for Telecom 
• IBM Transformation Accelerator and Manager for ICD-10
• IBM Customer Advisor Accelerator for Retail Banking
• IBM Professional Certification Accelerator for Education 
• IBM Vendor Trade Fund Management Accelerator

Game Changing Passport Advantage Agreement Revisions
Migrate to Passport Advantage: no minimum purchase, one renewal, volume discounts

Revised Passport Advantage agreements bring multiple sets of existing terms together and offer Passport Advantage Express clients the option to migrate to Passport Advantage. Now a single agreement covers IBM Appliances, SaaS offerings, new licenses and Software Subscription and Support — with no entry point requirement for Passport Advantage.

Datasheet — IBM WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute
Grid V8
Today’s globally integrated business environment needs smarter IT solutions that respond to changing business demands of the dramatic growth of web activity and requires cost effective business transaction processing. With rising customer expectations, businesses require 24×7 availability for OLTP processes while at the same time needing to take advantage of the cost savings available through batch processing. Traditional batch, however, suffers from the limitations of a “batch window,” which does not support the 24×7, always-on, uptime requirement of OLTP applications. To achieve the best of both worlds, IBM has introduced an integrated multifunctional and multiplatform Java batch solution that improves operational efficiency of business transaction processing, with support for batch jobs alongside online transactions. It delivers a near real-time user experience while optimizing costs.

Simple batch jobs alone may not address the challenges of the modern enterprise. Your IT team needs to repeatedly extend custom functionality to meet tactical needs. But over time, it becomes a suite of custom middleware that is expensive to maintain and draws resources away from core business objectives.

A batch solution that takes into account your requirements and uses your existing infrastructure is now available. The solution incorporates best practices and lessons learned from the emerging paradigms of High Performance Computing, GridComputing, and Utility Computing. Today’s infrastructures must easily adapt, incorporating future technologies, and the applications hosted within it need to be able to use modern tooling and programming best practices.

IBM^® WebSphere^® Extended Deployment Compute Grid V8 is a next-generation batch processing system, designed to meet the requirements of any industry and company size.

With WCG v8, your organization can:

• Optimize cycle time—provide flexibility in business processes to run bulk or real-time activities, depending on business needs
• Simplify architecture and manage costs with shared service infrastructure for batch and OLTP
• Improve time-to-market of deliverables with a standardized programming model, tools and a shared infrastructure for developing batch and OLTP services
• Experience “batch as a service,” an emerging service paradigm for using Java batch front-ended with web services
• Simplify end-to-end batch management across different execution environments such as WAS (V6, V7 and V8) and CICS
• Reduce costs by executing batch processing in Java and off loading to zAAP engines on z/OS^®

Figure 1: Customers need near real-time information and an always-on OLTP system. The IBM WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid solution enables the interleaving of OLTP and batch workloads 24×7, as shown in this diagram (click image to enlarge).

Benefit from a proven batch architectural framework for modernization:
IBM has created an architectural framework that provides a platform for meaningful integration between OLTP and batch applications. This approach allows continuous batch execution using shared business logic on a shared infrastructure between batch and OLTP applications without impacting response time requirements for OLTP applications, providing you with a near real-time experience.

WCG is an integral part of this architectural framework for batch modernization. It offers a consistent and systematic integration strategy across multiple business components. It allows for continuous batch processing, enables SOA transformation through reuse of services, uses in-house Java skills for batch modernization projects, reduces cost through use of specialty processors and improves hardware efficiency by utilizing unused capacity during OLTP processing for batch windows.

The WCG, in combination with WebSphere Application Server (WAS), offers multiple configuration options and support for multiple business models and deployment platforms. It also supports a wide range of scenarios, from open source projects with no up-front budget, to simple administration of a single server environment, to a clustered, highly available, high-volume environment with edge-of-network services.

WCG can address a number of usage patterns:

1. Share services and reuse code between OLTP and batch
2. Reduce batch windows or compress time using the Parallel Job Manager
3. Run batch workloads in a 24x7 mode in conjunction with OLTP applications

Figure 2: WebSphere Application Server is a powerful Java execution platform. WCG extends the WebSphere Application Server to provide a managed batch execution container environment. It is designed to run on both IBM System z® and distributed platforms. (click image to enlarge).

The new version of WCG v8 provides a managed batch execution environment that enables the entry, execution and management of Java batch processing in distributed or on mainframe environments.

Figure 3. Click image to enlarge

Figure 4. Click image to enlarge

News on the Web

Don't miss these WebSphere eBooks:

BPM for Dummies
Are you ready to tackle Business Process Management (BPM) for your enterprise? Do you want to improve efficiency, enhance agility, and also be more profitable? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

BPM is an approach toward managing how an organization operates so it better meets the needs of clients. BPM enables organizations to be more efficient and more capable of change. BPM is exactly what your organization needs to meet the challenges of the modern business climate.

Business Process Management For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition, shows you what BPM is and how it can help your organization. You see how the BPM solutions from IBM help you gain many benefits from higher customer satisfaction to greater agility in adapting to changing market conditions.

• Chapter 1:Understanding BPM
• Chapter 2: Getting Started with BPM
• Chapter 3: Putting BPM to Work for your Organization
• Chapter 4: Improving BPM Automation and Decision Management
• Chapter 5: Checking out BPM Success Stories
• Chapter 6: Reasons to Choose BPM from IBM

IBM Smart SOA Foundation: Application Foundation from WebSphere
The eBook, IBM Smart SOA Foundation: Application Foundation from WebSphere features use cases and examples for Banking, Insurance, and Telecom industries. Learn more how the WebSphere Application Foundation can help increase business agility in your organization.

IBM Takes Cloud, Collaboration to Government Agencies
IBM’s federal community cloud helps government agencies adopt social collaboration tools. IBM also takes its Lotus collaboration tools to the State of Vermont.

IBM CICS Interdependency Analyzer for z/OS, Version 3.2
Understand, reuse, and manage your critical CICS applications

The power of understanding
To stay competitive in today’s rapidly changing market environment, businesses are increasingly adopting new technologies like web services, events, and ATOM feeds to help them to respond to marketplace changes with increased speed and agility. Whatever the technology, you need a flexible and responsive IT infrastructure that lets you change your business quickly and cost-effectively. At the same time, you are under pressure to optimize your IT operations — improve the performance, availability and reliability of your existing applications, balance increasing workloads and minimize disruption of routine application maintenance to the user.

IBM^® CICS Interdependency Analyzer for z/OS^® V3.2 (CICS IA) is a discovery tool that helps you to understand the relationships, dependencies, and flows of CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS) applications, giving you the insight to update, modernize, and optimize them with confidence.

Features like Command Flow, a flexible query engine with a wide range of built-in analysis queries, coupled with an updated CICS Explorer plug-in make it possible to achieve even better reuse, management, and control of your applications through improved understanding. CICS IA helps architects, developers, testers, and system programmers with projects such as application modernization, CICS version-to-version upgrade, threadsafe analysis, affinity removal, and Web service refactoring that depend for their success on deep knowledge of application, system, and resource relationships.

Oracle Casts off Itanium at WebLogic Customers’ Expense
HP-UX customers may feel stranded following Oracle’s decision earlier this year to stop supporting future software development and certification on Intel^® Itanium^®-based servers. Fortunately, customers have other options.

TM Forum Case Study with IBM and Mobitel
TM Forum, the communication industry's leading standards body, recently published a case study book highlighting the partnership between IBM and Mobitel, a European service provider. Learn more about how IBM helped Mobitel streamline its order management process and launch new services to the market faster than ever before.

Enterprise OSGi YouTube Channel
For those with an interest in OSGi, why not look at the Enterprise OSGi YouTube channel which contains short videos of OSGi education. Feel free to submit your own video by contacting @sjmaple.

Education and Certification

Extend Your WebSphere Education with IBM WebSphere Expert Arena
Experience full function versions of WebSphere software in a safe sandbox environment. You can learn by doing — change product configurations, explore features or experiment with code. You can also use IBM WebSphere Expert Arena as a test environment to help you avoid costly issues as you deploy your project. Get the details.

Upcoming Webcasts, Seminars, and Events

Big EARs and OSGi
Earlier this year, the Enterprise OSGi YouTube channel was launched. The channel was created as part of the Evangelism strategy for OSGi applications and is dedicated to bringing latest OSGi news and WebSphere OSGi applications updates and new features. The first video uploaded was presented by Ian Robinson titled “Big EARs and OSGi”. Updates will be made over the coming months covering WAS v8 and the new features that were included. Many more videos have since been uploaded. If you would like to contribute to the Enterprise OSGi channel, please contact Simon Maple (@sjmaple).

OSGi in the Enterprise — An Interview with Ian Robinson
Ian Robinson is an IBM Distinguished Engineer in IBM's WebSphere development organization, chair of the OASIS Web Service Transactions technical committee, and co-author of the OSGi Transaction Service specification.

In this interview, Ian Robinson discusses modularity in general, the use of OSGi within the WebSphere application server product, and what makes OSGi a good compliment to the Java EE programming model. He also discusses the OSGi Enterprise Specification, its reference implementation Apache Aries, and Oracle's project Jigsaw which aims to bring modularity to the reference JDK.

Don't Miss These Upcoming and On Demand Webcasts:

September 7: XebiaLabs Discusses Best Practices for Accelerated Application Delivery Highlighting Delivery to IBM Workload Deployer
Middleware environments are becoming increasingly complex. Developers search for ways to eliminate time spent waiting for others to deploy new application code, administrators cope with the emergence of clouds and ever-faster software release cycles by automating the deployment process, and managers know they can save significantly in time and money by eliminating inefficiencies in the IT workflow
 
In this webinar, you will learn how Deployit, the XebiaLabs release automation platform, optimizes the delivery of applications to IBM’s WebSphere and cloud environments.
 
Join us and:

• Learn about Application Release Automation trends and Best Practices.
• Hear how you can optimize the delivery of your WebSphere applications via the Deployit platform. 
• Learn the pitfalls of creating your own deployment scripts and get more insight into the managing of applications outside of the WebSphere stack.

IT business professionals and technical WebSphere professionals will leave this webinar with an understanding of what they need to do to delivery applications faster and more accurately, in 2011.

September 15: TechChat Series for Monthly Online Chat with IBM Experts
The IBM TechChat Series provides IT professionals and practitioners with an opportunity to chat online “live” with IBM experts worldwide, in three different time zones. Each TechChat is scheduled for 30 minutes monthly between April–Nov. 2011 and features built-in translation so users can chat freely and easily without a language barrier between them. A one-time registration for one or more chats is available at www.ibm.com/smarter/techchats, where users also can submit a question to experts in advance of the TechChat.

Upcoming 5-Part Webcast: Succeeding with Business Agility: Five forward-thinking Organizations
Attend this webcast series to hear from Nationwide, Aetna, Premiere Healthcare with Parker Hannifin, and AXA Seguros — five companies that took different paths to becoming more nimble and creative in how they deliver new policies and products, enter new markets, serve clients and comply with new regulations. Listen to their experts discuss business goals, what challenges they needed to overcome, what they needed to focus on and how they got results. 

Consider this a mini-course in Business Agility taught in the best possible way – by example. This webcast series is sponsored by IBM.

On Demand: Top 10 Common Storage Management Problems and How to Handle Them on z/OS
As the volume of enterprise data has grown, most IT shops have not seen a corresponding growth in their budgets for staffing and for monitoring and managing storage. This has driven the need for more efficient storage strategies, including improving overall storage availability by taking action based on monitoring. If you can analyze data to detect and respond rapidly to unexpected events, you’ll be able to handle events before they become issues and save valuable storage resources.

Join us for this complimentary teleconference as we go over the Tivoli^® zStorage Management Initiative, including products for storage optimization, data integrity, disaster recovery and reporting capabilities, as well as management of disk and tape storage devices. We will discuss the major areas where the suite of products can help address common z/OS^® storage problems, and how to leverage the technology for a more efficient and effective way of managing your environment. During this session, you’ll be able to see and learn about the major capabilities that the Tivoli zStorage portfolio can provide your data center, giving you full visibility and management of your System z^® storage.

On Demand: Mini-Webinar: Five Apps Midsize Companies Should Move to the Cloud NOW!
While there are good reasons to proceed with caution toward moving your entire infrastructure to the cloud, some applications are no-brainers to migrate today. These mainstream apps are already being broadly adopted as software as a service (SaaS) by companies of all sizes, and their compelling cost, functionality and reliability benefits should be of particular interest to midsize businesses.

Jeff Kaplan takes us on a 30-minute whirlwind tour through these five application categories. You'll get an overview of the top vendors in each market and criteria you can use to determine if a move makes sense for you in the short term. Tune in to this fast-paced webinar that can start you on the road to lower costs and higher productivity today.

On Demand: The Future of Storage with Tony Pearson
The storage landscape is changing as a result of the convergence of virtualization, improvements in energy efficiency, cloud computing and users' insatiable demand for data. With adoption of server virtualization, storage is taking over as fastest-growing part of a typical company's information infrastructure.

New technologies are changing the way organizations manage their storage assets. Flash storage delivers more flexibility in creating hierarchical tiers to meet different demand priorities. Storage virtualization enables businesses to increasingly treat all their storage assets as a single pool. Data deduplication can significantly reduce redundancy. Cloud storage is another intriguing option, providing the capability to dynamically move storage assets to a shared model.

These and other advances require IT organizations to rethink the way they classify their storage assets. In this presentation, Tony Pearson outlines the seismic forces that are reshaping the storage landscape. You'll learn:

• How the shift in roles assigned to each storage type can be used to optimize storage and retrieval efficiency;
• How to take advantage of multiple tiers of storage via automated and policy-driven methods;
• How to apply the convergence of data center networking technologies — including FCoE, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS protocols, as well as voice and video —  to your environment;
• The importance of cloud computing, and the ways storage can participate in this new scheme.

On Demand: Introduction to the IBM WebSphere Application Server Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack
The latest release of the WebSphere Application Server Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack presents WebSphere application developers with the development and runtime features needed to extend the enterprise to mobile devices, such as tablets and smart  phones.

Listen to Chris Mitchell, IBM senior technical staff member, and Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack lead architect, talk about how the new IBM WebSphere Application Server Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack will help developers create more connected, interactive desktop and mobile applications.

On Demand: Apache Geronimo, WebSphere Community Edition and Open Source at IBM
Kevan Miller talks in detail about the Apache Geronimo open source enterprise application server and WebSphere's free Community Edition offering, largely built upon Geronimo, and how each fit into the Java application server space and IBM's WebSphere family. He also delves into open source's importance in general, and IBM's strong affinity for and contribution to it.

On Demand: How to Pilot Your Way to Greater Business Agility and Near-Term ROI
This webcast series features five proven IT projects for greater business agility and flexibility, designed to deliver faster ROI by taking a practical and incremental approach to implementation.

Each project:

• Targets a key initiative where IT can expand its business impact as a value creator and cost cutter: process improvement; operational decision-making; business connections; cloud and virtualization; build, deploy and manage applications.
• Provides assurance of a successful initial implementation with actual business results; establishing the proper infrastructure for expansion and preventing wrong and costly redesign and changes down the line.
• Register to watch one or all 5 of the IT projects and if you miss the live date, you can watch to on demand replays.

Part 1: NACCO Increases Engineering Productivity by Managing Change Effectively in 15 days
NACCO Materials Handling Group implemented new BPM processes for Engineering Change Notice (ECN) and Product Cost Authorization, using IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition and Lombardi Edition for Microsoft Office, because the existing platform was inefficient and manual-intensive. The new system increased the productivity of NACCO engineers by reducing their manual hand-offs and interactions with legacy systems. One process was selected for implementation before wider roll-out.

Attend this webcast to learn how the ECN was designed, developed and deployed in 15 days, and how NACCO extended this process to all ECNs (both new and existing).

Part 2: How to efficiently deploy and virtualize your application environment
Wondering if your organization can leverage cloud in the midst of flat or tightening budgets? Don't miss this webcast to learn how you can begin enjoying the cost saving benefits of efficient application deployment to private Clouds with WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, regardless of your enterprises size, industry or internal expertise. Additionally, enhance server utilization and efficiently manage application workloads with WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. Don't miss this time and investment saving session!

Part 3: Intelligently manage your application environment and deliver rich user experiences faster with WebSphere Application Server v8
Do you struggle with the business demands for fast delivery of innovative, high performing applications and services and the concurrent need to manage costs? Learn how a strong, flexible application foundation, based on the new WebSphere Application Server v8, helps you quickly deliver on business needs while balancing key considerations such as security, scalability and manageability. Control costs and improve TCO in homogenous and mixed infrastructures, from distributed to z/OS environments. Listen to the webcast to learn more about how IBM's market leading application server can promote the agility you need for business success today.

Part 4: Decision Automation Pilot: "Improve the timing and quality of your most important operational decisions within key business processes"
Imagine being able to implement 20% of your business rules that cover 80% of your business transactions; allowing you to double the pass-through rate of all billing transactions in just 9 weeks. One major transportation company in North America did just that. With this Quick Win pilot, you start small, with meaningful business rules, deploying a subset of your business decisions to demonstrate and validate the value of the technology and implementation methodology. Through this pilot, you will directly and measurably experience how intelligent decision automation can improve your business before making a larger investment.

Part 5: Making Vital Business Connections Faster and More Effectively
Did you think you could onboard a new business partner 50% faster, or reduce the time and cost to change your IT systems by 50%? You can. 

By leveraging an incremental approach to SOA, you can begin to make faster, better, and richer connections across your business network in less than 9 months. Watch this webcast to learn how.

On Demand: BPM: Conquering Complexity
With ever-changing customer demands, fluctuating market opportunities, global competition, and the tangled web of local, state, federal, and international laws and regulations, the business environment seems more of a challenge than ever. But companies that can see through the complexity to identify underlying opportunity stand to rise above the crowded playing field.

Available on demand, a 60-minute interactive discussion of how efficient processes help ensure that organizations can capitalize on change, rather than be overwhelmed by it.

You’ll learn:

• How business process management helps companies deliver better services faster, with fewer mistakes, and at a lower cost
• Best practices for successful BPM implementation
• The key elements any BPM solution must offer
• How new features in IBM Business Process Manager enable companies to design process applications that integrate with internal systems and manage productivity in real-time.

• Interesting concepts. Excited to discuss with others in the company.
• Very valuable information which I'll be considering for the very near future.
• Inclusive of all aspects of a business process.
• Hum... My whole industry could use this to innovate.

On Demand: Accelerate Your Applications — Learn How IBM WebSphere Application Acceleration Solutions can Enhance Applications Performance (Public Sector)
Are you expanding your application services through the use of Cloud Computing?  Do you reach an international web audience? Are you achieving your web application service delivery objectives?  Are your enterprise applications secure from malicious attacks? If you answered Yes to any of these questions, IBM has solutions that address these business requirements.

Learn how to accelerate your applications across the Internet, while providing consistent end-user response across the globe.  At the same time, you can improve your enterprise application security, improve availability, and better utilize all of the server resources.  If you are exploring or are using Software as a Service applications via Cloud connectivity, learn how IBM's acceleration solutions can improve performance, simplify cloud connectivity, and secure these external connections.  In this webinar, you will be introduced to the family of IBM Application Acceleration solutions that are available today.

On Demand: Introduction to WebSphere Application Server V8 Part 1: Speed Delivery of New Applications and Services
The pace of business is unrelenting and it falls to developers to deliver new applications and services as quickly as possible. In this first session of a two part series, learn how the new WebSphere Application Server V8 speeds development through broad choice and support of programming models and open standards including JEE 6, IBM Java SDK 6.0 (J92.6), OSGi, SCA, XML, CEA, SIP, Java Batch and Dynamic Scripting. Learn how you can also easily extend the reach of WebSphere Application Server applications from the desktop to mobile devices with the new Web 2.0 and Mobile feature pack.

On Demand: Accelerate Your Applications — Learn How IBM WebSphere Application Acceleration Solutions Can Enhance Applications Performance (Global Sector)
Learn how to accelerate your applications across the internet, while providing consistent end user response across the globe.  At the same time, you can improve your enterprise.

On Demand: BPO Insider Secrets: Successful Cloud
Integration Strategies
Easily Integrate Multiple Applications to Automate Business Processes

In today's competitive global business environment, Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) strive to penetrate new markets, add new clients and onboard customers faster while delivering client satisfaction, reducing customer churn and lowering the overall cost per client. Hear a leading analyst from Saugatuck Technology share the latest trends in Business Process Outsourcing, key insights on why outsourcers are beginning to leverage cloud technology approaches and how you can gain significant improvements in your cost, performance and business agility.

Learn from IBM how new cloud integration approaches enable BPOs to onboard new clients in days – rather than weeks or months – accelerate time to revenue, improve client adoption and customer retention while opening the door to sell into new markets that have historically been just too difficult to penetrate.

Speakers:
Robert McNeill, Vice President, Research, Saugatuck Technology
Ron Wastal, VP, Business Development, IBM
Vidya Chadaga, Senior Product Manager, IBM

Don't Miss These Upcoming WebSphere Events:

August 29 – 30: 2011 Fall zEnterprise Premier Event
Four Seasons Resort — Santa Barbara, California
For more information, contact Pooja Prabhakar:  pooja.prabhakar@in.ibm.com


August 30 – 31: IBM Hursley Comes to Charlotte
Don't miss Hursley Comes to You (HCTY) in Charlotte, NC on August 30–31. This briefing brings the best Hursley lab speakers with deep technical skills, and in many cases are the architects that designed the products that they are speaking about. These sessions will not just focus on Connectivity and MQ, but many of our complementary products like Cast Iron, Sterling, ILOG and BPM.  If you want to have a deeper private conversation with one of our Hursley lab experts, attend the briefing and request a 1:1 meeting at the registration desk. To view the agenda and list of speakers, visit: www.ibm.com/events/Hursleyevents2011/Charlotte.

Aug. 30 – Sept. 2: IBM Platinum Sponsorship at Dreamforce 2011
Join IBM at Dreamforce 2011, salesforce.com's annual user conference in San Francisco, CA at the Moscone Center from Aug. 30 – Sept. 2 at Booth 1101. You will learn how WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration enables you to connect salesforce.com to your enterprise applications in just days with a simplified template-based architecture that leverages best-practices, as well as flexible deployment options (physical appliance, virtual instance or multi-tenant Cloud service). You will also see how Cognos 10 empowers organizations to outperform by providing analytics everyone can use, collective intelligence with built-in collaboration and actionable insight everywhere. Be sure to check out:

1. WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration Panel: IT Executive Insider: Secrets to Successful Salesforce.com and ERP Integration. You'll hear from IT and Business executives about how they've optimized salesforce.com's sales cloud, service cloud, custom cloud and Chatter by integrating them with other SaaS and on-premise business critical systems. Cloud integration maximizes their Salesforce experience, accelerates user adoption and saves them thousands of dollars by providing real-time visibility of data locked away in other enterprise applications.
2. Watson at our IBM booth #1101 to challenge him in a round of Jeopardy. While you're there, you can pick the brain of specialists from WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration or the Cognos team.

October 3 – 7: 2011 IBM System z Technical University
Plan now to attend the 2011 IBM System z Technical University, a premier System z Enterprise event, featuring zEnterprise, z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE and Linux on System z

In 2011, we will significantly expand our coverage of System z software, including DB2, CICS, MQ, WebSphere, IMS, Cognos and more.

This 4.5 day event is your opportunity to broaden your knowledge and expertise on System z technology from both hardware and software perspectives:

Learn more about how the zEnterprise mainframe solution is making it possible to deploy and intelligently manage workloads across mainframe and distributed technologies. Take a deep dive into the latest updates to z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE and Linux on System z. Explore products, solutions, events and resources for mainframe.

Is Your Infrastructure Vendor Holding You Back? Get Ready to Break Free!
Join us at a Break Free World Tour event — and see real-world examples of how Smarter Computing from IBM is changing the economics of IT. Learn first-hand about innovations you can implement today without increasing your IT budget.

Attend an Impact 2011 Regional Event or Impact Comes to
You Seminar
Couldn’t get to Impact 2011 in Las Vegas? There are still plenty of regional events and seminars coming to cities around the globe. Attend one near you to learn about the latest IBM WebSphere, BPM, SOA, and cloud technologies that can transform your business for greater agility and growth.

Don't Miss These Whitepapers:

WebSphere Application Server v7 Oracle WebLogic 11g
This document briefly covers key differences between IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and Oracle WebLogic Server. While both products are of high quality and will perform well even in demanding mission-critical environments, there are still some differences in their efficiency and resulting total cost of ownership.

In this document we will briefly cover the following capabilities

• Performance
• Administrative and management tools
• License and support costs
• Licensing policies
• Virtualization and cloud support
• Standards support
• Operating System and DBMS support

Three Steps to Progress BPM from Project to Program
This white paper describes how the movement toward broad BPM programs has changed what companies need in terms of BPM technology and “know-how.” We describe three steps for helping establish a solid foundation for a BPM program that can enable your organization to scale its process improvement capability in a way that is designed to deliver optimal value to the business.

IBM Business Agility Study: Cutting Through Complexity with Business Agility
This Business Agility study surveyed companies in the financial, insurance and healthcare industries. Each company surveyed described themselves as agile and achieved significant business results. The study reveals strong correlation between business agility and success and agility can be a powerful tool for cutting through the complexities dominating the corporate landscape to seize opportunities.

Download the whitepaper to gain greater insights into these industry leading companies and understand what these companies discovered and how they realized greater agility to achieve success.

Free Upcoming September 2011 WebSphere Support Technical Exchange Webcasts

Upcoming and Previous webcast can be found on the WebSphere Support Technical Exchange webcasts home page.

The Upcoming links will work for two days past the presentation. A week after the webcast, an audio replay of the exchange will be available on the Previous Webcast tab on the WebSphere Technical Exchange home page.

Participation is easy and free — no registration required.

Date: August 25, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Configuring WebSphere Adapter for File Transfer Protocol using WebSphere Transformation Extender
Presenter: Alex Reyes, Ken Amelio, Greg McEachern
Presenter Title: WBI Adapter L2 Support; WBI Adapter L2 Support; WTX Level 2 Customer Support, Team Lead
Abstract: This presentation explains how to configure WebSphere Adapter for File Transfer Protocol using WebSphere Transformation Extender, the different settings needed to perform operations with the Adapter for File Transfer Protocol, and the corresponding WebSphere Transformation Extender settings.

Date: August 30, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Improving Your PMR Experience: Insights into WebSphere Message Broker Support
Presenter: Thomas Bien
Presenter Title: Staff Software Engineer
Abstract: This WebSphere Support Technical Exchange is designed to provide some insights into the PMR process, as well as initiatives and expectations of the IBM Support team. While the presentation focuses on the WebSphere Message Broker product, it also provides information applicable to all IBM products.

Date: August 31, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Troubleshooting WebSphere Process Server - Integration with an Oracle Database
Presenter: Dr. Stephan Volz
Presenter Title: BPC L2 Software support engineer
Abstract: This webcast focuses on common database issues observed with WebSphere Process Server and an Oracle database. Topics include what configuration needs to be checked when using one, and the available tools for analyzing performance related problems.

Date: September 6, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Extracting X.509 Public Certificates with IBM Connection and Configuration Verification Tool for SSL/TLS
Presenter: Jinwoo Hwang
Presenter Title: Software Engineer
Abstract: This session provides an overview of the IBM Connection and Configuration Verification Tool for SSL/TLS and explains how to extract X.509 public certificates from a server over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, and import them into a client's keystore.

Date: September 7, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Troubleshooting WebSphere Process Server - Integration with a DB2 Database
Presenter: Dr. Stephan Volz
Presenter Title: BPC L2 Software support engineer
Abstract: This presentation focuses on common database issues observed with the use of the WebSphere Process Server and a DB2 database. It includes information on what configuration needs to be checked when using one, the tools that are available to analyze performance problems, and how real time statistics can be used to their advantage.

Date: September 8, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Running and Debugging Dynamic Scripting Applications under CICS
Presenter: Byron Baldwin, Shayla Robinson
Presenter Title: CICS/CPSM/CICS TOOLS Level II Software Engineer
Abstract: This presentation focuses on showing customers how to run and debug a dynamic scripting (PHP) application in the CICS environment.

Date: September 13, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Gathering and Displaying Statistics in WebSphere MQ V7
Presenter: Angel Rivera
Presenter Title: WebSphere MQ L2 Support
Abstract: This webcast presents how to gather and display statistics in WebSphere MQ V7, by using the sample amqsmon and the SupportPac MS0P 'WebSphere MQ Explorer - Configuration and Display Extension Plug-ins'.

Date: September 14, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Jython Code Reuse in a WebSphere Application Server Wsadmin Environment
Presenter: Bob Gibson
Presenter Title: Advisory Software Engineer
Abstract: Almost every writer of WebSphere Application Server scripts reaches a point where they have some code that they want to reuse. This talk describes the different ways to reuse Jython objects, and the things to consider when deciding upon the technique that is most appropriate for your environment.

Date: September 27, 2011
Time: 11 AM EDT (GMT-4)
Title: Installation, Configuration and Business Space Security
Presenter: Sergio Arizpe
Presenter Title: Staff Software Engineer
Abstract: This WebSphere Support Technical Exchange discusses installation, configuration, and Business Space security integration with various consuming products. Overview, best practices and troubleshooting information are explored in network deployment and standalone LDAP.