EXTOL Technology Blog

For those old enough to remember this reference (and for those young enough to know how to Google it), sometimes I feel like the Lorne Greene of EXTOL. Not in his role as the patriarch of Bonanza’s Cartwright clan, but rather as the dog food pitchman.

The series of 1980s TV commercials for Alpo^® dog food featuring Greene closed with the veteran actor claiming that Alpo is so good he feeds it to his own dogs. Hence, the notion of using one’s own product became known as “eating your own dog food”. Or so the legend goes. [A less-tasteful alternative account of the phrase’s origin has the president of a rival pet food corporation eating a can of his company's dog food at every shareholders meeting.]

During my first eight years with EXTOL, I was blissfully unaware of this term. But when I assumed the newly-created role of Special Projects Coordinator four years ago, Tony Baran (our co-founder, President, and CEO) caught me lingering at the coffeemaker and directed me to lead the effort to “eat our own dog food”. I mustered my best blank stare, nodded assuredly, scurried to my cubicle, and Googled that phrase (actually, I had one of my younger officemates show me how to Google it). Only then did Tony’s mandate to “streamline our processes by eliminating error-prone re-keying of transactional and/or persisted data by automating the exchange of information between applications, databases, spreadsheets, and other sources” − I’m paraphrasing here − make sense. And oh yeah, “use EXTOL Business Integrator to do it”. Aha! − we would “eat our own dog food”.

While “eating your own dog food” now has been elevated to acronym status, EYODF is more than a mouthful − I prefer the much more palatable and trendy “dogfooding”. While we don’t make (nor eat, for that matter) dog food at EXTOL, we do produce some seriously efficient business-to-business (B2B) and application-to-application (A2A) integration software that coordinates external partner interactions and internal business activities. And now we’re dogfooding.

In subsequent posts, I’ll share our experiences in using EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI) to solve our company’s data integration, manipulation, and migration needs. By telling our story and noting the lessons learned (mostly the hard way − those are the best-remembered lessons), we hope you can use EBI to your best advantage to tackle similar projects in your organization. You have them − just look around.

And please, if you care to share your stories with us, do. Who knows: maybe we’ll send you a can of Alpo.

Recently, I was having dinner with some old friends and the conversation centered on our respective fields that we work in.  When the conversation turned to me, I chatted up how I worked in commercial software, particularly the Integration space.  I received some curious looks, like my friends were trying to get a grasp on what I was talking about.  Then it hit me….What does Integration mean to someone unfamiliar with the discipline? Why does it matter? What are the benefits, and the risks? How much of a problem is this? So, I decided to write a blog, from my perspective, on why Integration is important.

First, let’s think about the meta-types of challenges that businesses face today. Two flavors emerge quickly; problems of the moment (tactical) and visions of where they want to go (strategic). Read more…

Enterprise Service Busses (ESBs) offer an interesting communications layer that enables an enterprise to expose data to interested parties (i.e. applications, data-feeds, etc.) with a Publish/Subscribe model.  The Pub/Sub model originated in the printed media world, utilized as a distribution model for newspapers and magazines. It has evolved with modern times into the electronic age in the form of email-subscribed newsletters, and more recently, RSS feeds such as blogs.

In the enterprise, there is a growing need to share data among systems, both internally (A2A) and externally (B2B).  However, as new demands for sharing data surface, we need a way to “bolt in” the new requestors without impacting our current implementations.

ESBs commonly implement a variant of the GoF Observer Pattern.  This exposes a Publication/Subscription model allowing information sources (publisher) to expose data (message) on a queue.  One or more interested parties (subscriber) consume the data.  The key benefit of loose coupling in a Publication/Subscription model is that the Publisher does not need to know, or care, about “who” is subscribing.  The data is published and downstream subscribers use the data as they see fit.

Read more…