The recent announcement of Apple's cloud illustrates yet again that a new era is about to start: that of the cloud - and with that, the massive adoption of service oriented architectures (SOA).

This will have an impact so huge that it is hard to underestimate. Some of the obvious changes that will happen are most likely the following:

• Infrastructure (operations) will become agile - at the expense of IT jobs in operations. Applications will be deployed with unprecedented ease and speed. This is because the cloud infrastructure will transparently allocate the resources that now are allocated by human administrators.
• SOA will become mainstream. This is because even the most common infrastructure services will be virtualized, running in the same or a different VM from the application, and scaling up and down as needed.

The interesting part - at least to us - is that transactions will become more distributed than ever. We are ready for this change - are you?

We are going through exciting times here at Atomikos! Today, we are pleased to announce that we will be offering single-point-of-contact, end-to-end support across different back-end systems for the following database vendors:

• Oracle
• DB2
• SQLServer
• Sybase
• Informix
• PostgreSQL via 2ndQuadrant (added on June 30 2011)

…and the following queuing vendors:

• MQSeries
• ActiveMQ
• SonicMQ

This is an initial list that will probably grow over time (stay in touch to find out).

What does this mean? Well, it means that Atomikos can offer support from the queue to the database and back again without you having to worry about dealing with different support channels.

This support is optional and not included in the standard support subscription. Contact us to find out more…

Data consistency in the cloud is a totally different ball game - as perfectly illustrated by this newsletter issue from ZapThink. Essentially, you have to cope with some form of partition tolerance and stale data values in caches. This is usually summarized as the CAP issue (for more details, see the ZapThink post).

Luckily, the solution to the problem can be as simple as outlined in our solution to the CAP problem.

Life is good

The cloud is an interesting phenomenon, to say the least. Just last week, I witnessed a demo by Adrian Colyer at the What's Next (Paris) event that left me very impressed because I could easily understand the problems that it solves:

• Slow infrastructure setup is replaced by instant availability of resources (databases, hardware)
• Scalability is trivially easy: on command is all it takes
• Services are promoted as the means of reuse - effectively enabling SOA strategies

I know from experience that these are all pain points in today's IT infrastructure for just about every big organization. So for mainstream operations, I think the cloud is going to be a killer.

While this is all fine, I still wonder how this will work out for one of our core markets: finance. Sure enough, initial offerings are showing up, but so far nothing really interesting for our retail banking audience. Add to this the fact that most banks are typically very conservative (they have to be) and the cloud for the banking world seems a bit more of a future situation than for the rest of the industry.

But certainly that time will come too, and for those days Atomikos has the exact kind of technology for cloud-enabling transaction guarantees that banks depend on so much. That is because we offer the third generation of TP monitoring technology: light-weight, embeddable, perfectly scalable and SOA capable too.

The future is bright;-)

Atomikos Named "Cool Vendor" by Leading Analyst Firm

Vendors selected for the “Cool Vendor” report are innovative, impactful and intriguing

Mechelen, Belgium, May 12, 2011– Atomikos, a leading provider of transaction management solutions for high volume transaction environments, today announced it has been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the Cool Vendors in Application and Integration Platforms, 2011 report by Gartner, Inc.

“We are greatly honored to be included in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner. We believe it is further validation that our “JEE without the application server” message is resonating and gaining traction. As market adoption of lightweight Java containers increases, interest in solutions such as Atomikos ExtremeTransactions rises in parallel. We are seeing increasing market interest in our technology and in our app server free approach – particularly within transaction-centric industries such as financial services, telecommunications and transportation sectors,” says Guy Pardon, CTO, Atomikos.

About Atomikos ExtremeTransactions

For CTO’s architects and developers in Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments where data quality and performance is mission critical, Atomikos ExtremeTransactions is a transaction management system that automates and manages both simple and highly distributed transaction processes, preventing costly data corruption in the event of a system failure or crash. The product’s patent pending Try-Cancel/Confirm (TCC ) approach is optimized for two-phase compensation-based transactions significantly reducing workflow complexity in SOA environments. There is no need for the modeling of error paths, making the solution ideal for Service Oriented Architectures with composite applications and complicated transaction trees.

Atomikos ExtremeTransactions can be purchased online through the Atomikos website. More information can be found at Atomikos ExtremeTransactions

About Atomikos Atomikos is a market leader in transaction management for XTP, SOA and open source environments. Atomikos’ software safeguards your critical transactions and prevents costly data loss in the event of a system failure or crash by automating the cancellation of failed business transactions. For more information visit our website at www.atomikos.com or contact us at sales@atomikos.com

Cool Vendor Disclaimer About Gartner's Cool Vendors Selection Process Gartner's listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn't do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months