Welcome to Above All Software.

I founded Above All Software in early 2002, after spending a year studying Web services and realizing what they can do to make it easier for everyone to interact with their enterprise information systems. I realized that this standard had that magic combination of simplicity and power, that it was going to be a hit, and it could be used to make the "silo walls" of our information systems go away forever.

25 Years of Breaking Down Walls

When I started Informix Software in 1980 I actually had the same goal, and we achieved that goal. At that time the "silos" were just simple tables of data, usually read and written by COBOL programs. The Customer file would be managed by one COBOL program, and the Order file by another. If the boss wanted a report of all the customers, each listed with all their orders, well, then a third program would have to be written, and the programmer would have to get the File Definition parts of the source code for each program copied into this new "composite application" that they were creating. That was our tool to make the silo wall go away between that Customer file and that Orders file.

I am glad to say that we IT professionals get smarter over time, so we invented the relational database management system to do this, and do it in a less labor-intensive way. It is now the most valuable tool in all of data processing, relating millions of tables with each other every second of the day all over the world. But we have used it so much that we have created new silos – each enterprise application has its own database, and its own application server. That application server was also a great invention, and during my days at Vantive and Visigenic software it was a privilege to join with others and pioneer the "three-tier architecture" where application servers held the running business logic that did transactions with the databases.

Since a silo’s database might have thousands of tables, and how they relate to each other might be subject to change daily as restructuring is done for performance or other reasons, it is only appropriate now to interact with the logic in the application server that knows how to do things like find a customer, or put an order or credit hold. Those "little software robots" of business logic might deal with one database one day, check two databases the next day after a merger of companies, or just check the product line information within the merged company the third day. Since change is constant, we as a species have graduated to another level of modeling. The business logic in our production servers is now the model of how our enterprise works. This used to be a Tower of Babel, with some of that code being expressed as C functions, some as COBOL subroutines or CICS transactions, Java methods, or whatever flavor, on whatever operating system using a wide variety of remote procedure call mechanisms. Web Services resolves that. The mechanics of how to talk to any "little software robot" is now clear.

Then Came SOA.

But, just because we can talk to them doesn’t mean we know what to say. How do you authenticate to this Web service versus that one. One server has robots for customer data, and another has robots for orders data. How do you get the orders for a particular customer? What if the order data operations return more data than certain users want, or are entitled to see? How can we "project" the data down to a smaller subset? The technical term for this changing the inputs and outputs of operations and the data structures that come and go is "refactoring" the objects. We use a friendlier phrase called "modeling up" – we advocate that you model the Web service operations you want from the ones that you have, and we give you the tools to do it.

Issues such as "object right-sizing" and the semantics of what to send to, and what you will get back from, a Web service are the challenges remaining in bringing down the silo walls, and it is this challenge that Above All is answering. Our products sit, well, up "above all" of the business logic in an enterprise and we create the model of all of your business logic and how it can be utilized. We give you tools to model and compose several Web services, possibly from different silos, into a single "business service" that has just the right information in it. Your organization might actually need several different models of "a customer and his orders" such as "a customer and his backorders, but just the critical parts so that when I build an application for a PDA it doesn’t send too much data over a slow connection". Or, you might want "a customer and his orders that are on back order" or "a customer and his orders and the product details about those products on that order" from yet a third silo.

Above All Breaks Down the Last Silo Walls.

I think you get the idea. It is great that Web services make it easy, mechanically, to get to all your enterprise silos. But, to make use of those Web services we need a new metadata repository that knows about the input and output objects of those operations, and how those objects work in composition with each. And, then we need a new engine, not a database engine, but a new engine that performs "composition" operations on Web service operations, to build and deliver, on the fly, these models, which are what the business person wants to see and use.

So, building an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is what we help you do. We help you take the programmer’s interfaces that are your existing "little software robots" and model them up to "business person’s" transactional objects of different kinds that the business users of your organization really need. We supply lots of tools to build that repository and share it (Above All Studio and our SOA Repository) and to execute those models as composite Web services (in our Composite Server). Finally, there are tools to build complete applications in our Studio, or you can use these objects in any development environment you can think of, from Visual Studio .NET and Java IDE’s such as Eclipse, to workflow BPM tools, to Office components such as Excel or Infopath, really anything that can communicates with Web Services.

Please try our visual tools to "model up" from what you have to what you want, and to visualize these business services and run them. Try our rich client and web client deployment tools, and use them either for prototyping or for production deployment. And try our Composite Server execution engine, which does for Web services what the RDBMS did for tables of data. It brings down the silo walls, this time for good.

Thank you for your interest in Above All Software.

Sincerely,

Roger Sippl

Co-founder and Chairman
Above All Software