Festival of Economics in Trento is a key meeting in Italy, aiming to debate about Economics, Information, social impacts and correlated topics. Its fifth edition, taking place from 3^rd to 6^th June 2010, offers a great agenda including four days of debates, meetings and lessons, offering the opportunity to discuss and understand which are the circumstances that usually foster the economic growth and that, at the same time, allow to face and avoid recessions. The event also intends to underline how crucial is for everyone to access free and accurate information.

Spagic has contributed to the realization of the MyFestival back-end application, responsible for the process modelling and web-services integration. Have a look at it!

Spagic is an example of open source projects connecting two of the best-known OS communities: OW2 Consortium, hosting Spagic project, and Eclipse Foundation, hosting eBPM project that will offer the new core component to Spagic next version. Even if it’s common knowledge that communities usually protect their boundaries, I personally hope that such cross-project examples will help break boundaries and widen collaboration.

Follow my post about Ecology of Value.

The agenda is under construction, but we are going to have speeches about Eclipse Foundation (Ralph Mueller), Eclipse SOA Initiative (Ricco Deustcher) and experiences/use cases concerning the adoption of open source and Eclipse-based technologies.
Now I’m looking for more sponsors to make the event successful, and, obviously, for attendees (registration will open in June).
Visit the event website and fix the date in you agenda: October 5th in Rome.

A lot of vendors is proposing similar solutions, for example as project leader of Spagic I was encircled by competitors working on the theme of Open Source SOA: there was PetalsLink with their Petals ESB solution, BonitaSoft with Bonita BPM solutions, just to make few names.

But also on Business Intelligence (we exposed also the solution SpagoBI) the history was exactly the same: a lot of competitors was very near to our stand, and in some cases I confess that I asked a demo for looking the competitor offer.

The problem is: how a customer can choose between all these different but similar solutions ?

One possible answer is looking the solutions at the technological level: this is not always possible because it requires to much time and too much technical skills.

In the case of Spagic, for example, I know without doubt that it’s the best technological solution for Open Source SOA in the world, because it’s based on the wonderful OSGi technology, it provides a user friendly BPMN editor for designing processes, a winsome monitoring console, and so on. But the problem is that when I talk to customers about all of these fantastic technologies, usually they know only 20% of the acronym that I use. But this is right, because the technology is “my problem”, not their problem: their choice should be based on others criteria such as

• Licenses availables (GPL, LGPL, commercial, ..)
• Support policies
• Maturity of the solution
• Availability if Enterprise Features (High Availability, Transaction Management, …)
• and obviously the functions available.

I hope to write next post returning from a conference in a nice place like Madrid, or New York

winsome

Who has already met me knows that I’m a passionate Eclipse programmer and supporter, since Eclipse was born. So I’m very happy that since 2010 my company has been an official Eclipse member. I strongly think that this could be a very important occasion to make our projects be better known and help their growth abroad. Obviously I’ll take the opportunity to take a tour at SanFrancisco bay area, where there are a lot of interesting things to see and to enjoy.

In my following post I’ll make a detailed report about.