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open adaptor Enterprise Integration and Open Source Bill Barnett IT Director – Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Track: Strategic summit Date: Thursday 26 th July Time: 2:45pm –3:15pm Location: Catalina Ballroom. Do you…. Never have to integrate legacy crud?
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openadaptorEnterprise Integration and Open SourceBill BarnettIT Director – Dresdner Kleinwort WassersteinTrack: Strategic summitDate: Thursday 26th JulyTime: 2:45pm –3:15pmLocation: Catalina Ballroom
Do you… • Never have to integrate legacy crud? • Work for a large company that is completely rational, focused, and integrated? • Love learning and customising for every new middleware, data representation, and third party product that comes along? • Really enjoy solving nit-picky technical problems that don’t add value to your business? • Like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for simple EAI products and legions of professional services consultants? Then don’t bother looking at openadaptor
Who are Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW)? What is openadaptor? Why opensource? And just what does that mean? Is it working? Agenda 1
Who are Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein? • Investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank AG • Formed in Jan 2001 – Combination of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and Wasserstein Parella • Full array of advisory and capital markets products • Key market focus; TMT, Financial Institutions, Energy and Power • 8,000 people in more than 30 locations worldwide 2
Business challenges • We need to reduce the cost of doing business for our clients • We need to make it easier for our customers to do business with us • We need to increase business volumes • All our clients are sophisticated users of Investment Banks • Our customers worry about supplier lock-in • Our work force is global and mobile • Co-opetition is becoming common place • DrKW is one of the worlds top Investment banks but by no means the largest. Quality of staff, speed of response and technology are vital elements in our constant battle to get to the top 3
Technology Context • Long established focus on common messaging • Make leading edge technology easy for developers to adopt • Deep investments and involvement in J2EE, primarily thru BEA but some implementations in apache/tomcat/jrun • Deep involvement with leading edge Microsoft technology, especially .NET
The solution becomes the problem • Selected standard messaging middleware • It did solve the “many-to-many” problem • Couldn’t roll it out fast enough due to: • Too much training about the middleware itself • Too much custom coding required in each application
Next solution? • Build a java system integration framework • Break the problem down using a plumbing metaphor • Create a set of plug-n-play connectors for many leading edge technologies • Goals: • Zero programming integration • Reuse existing interfaces
What is openadaptor • Open source system integration toolkit • Developed internally by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein • In use in 70 applications around the world • In excess of 500K messages per day • Active open source community at http://www.openadaptor.org • Solves integration problems faced by us and our partners/customers • Not limited to financial industries
The Results • Integrate applications in hours or days rather than weeks • Shield developers from knowledge of underlying middleware • Reuse existing interfaces for new integration problems • Allow vendor independence
Why Open Source? • Wanted to use the tools to integrate with our customers • Wanted to collaborate with bright developers all over the globe working on the same problems • Wanted to associate DrKW with best practices in technology and software development • Wanted to recruit and retain the very best and brightest from across the IT industry • Wanted to push the product forward with new features and broad platform support 6
What did it take? • Minimal code cleanup • Change package names • Remove GPL libraries • Remove some proprietary libraries • Chose a license (very broad Apache/BSD-style license) • Transferred IP to the Software Conservancy • Commenced in April 2000, openadaptor released in January 2001 • Collabnet key advisor and partner in Open Source process
Roles and Responsibilities • Our internal team became build managers • Some internal effort on community building • Sourcing from Collabnet: • Infrastructure and hosting for openadaptor site • Expert advice on the the open source process • Additional community building resources
Community • Observers • Watching and learning • Users • Integrating it in their own solutions • Developers • Contributing code and other artifacts
Is it working? • 183 unique subscribers • In discussion with many other technology companies and financial institutions • Have already received important contributions from community • JMX support, ant build • Advanced memory and performance testing • Other stuff underway in the community • Web service integration (soap sources and sinks) • Etc, etc • Having Fun!
Why was OA a good candidate? • Already doing “internal” open source-style development • Code in great shape • Good documentation, developers guide, etc • Support team that grokked open source • No threatened revenue stream • Fantastic business case • We aren’t primarily a technology company
Would we do it again? • Yes, but… • Difficult to find such good candidates • Difficult to build the right business case • What might we look at? • Other pieces of OA infrastructure • Analytics libraries • Common business components • Other IP