In this session, Bob Bixby, ILOG Chief Science Officer, discussed how optimization has become a key component in addressing common business and manufacturing problems today. He explained what has and hasn’t changed in approaches to optimization over the many years that he has been in the business.

Bob used IBM’s East Fishkill 300mm semiconductor wafer manufacturing plant as an example to explain the benefits that optimization and automated scheduling can bring to highly complex manufacturing processes.

People have been trying to find ways to improve process optimization for years, of course. The difference today is that processes are now so complex that traditional methods can no longer cope. It’s no longer feasible to try and optimize an entire project. Instead, optimization solutions must break down processes into separate sub-processes and optimize those individually. The old generation of solutions, despite enormous progress in processing capacity, required too much time to generate optimum solutions. even with a turnaround time of less than 24 hours, solutions would often be obsolete before they could even be implemented.

By combining constraint programming optimization, process modeling and decision management systems, ILOG’s optimization suite can be used to build real-time optimization solutions. Bob’s slides contained plenty of statistics from the IBM Fishkill application, showing how this approach has been used to bring dramatic optimization improvements.

He highlighted, for example, the 25.3% reduction in cycle time (production time + waiting time) that the ILOG solution was able to achieve in certain plant sub-processes, which contributed to overall efficiency improvements of around 6%. Considering that the plant handles some 15,000 batches a day, that’s a considerable achievement and represents considerable cost savings for the plant.

These cutting-edge optimization solutions are no longer a nice-to-have. They are essential for survival in today’s white hot competitive environments.

Jon Ferraiolo works for IBM but works more or less full time heading up the OpenAjax Alliance. Ajax is the power behind mashups, and because mashups take components from different suppliers, interoperability, and therefore the work of the OpenAjax Alliance, is critical.

IBM quickly recognized the importance of defining an agile, open source industry group to defined standards for the industry.

The key concepts behind Web 2.0 are community, collaboration, user experience, and user generated content. Going beyond user-generated content, mashups allow the creation of user-generated applications.

Mashups are about self-service application development, enabling organizations to move to the next level of innovation, speed, and agility by allowing users to combine and remix different sets of data in new ways. In this way, mashups can provide insight into corporate data that was simply not possible before.

Many people are unclear about the difference between mashups and portals (including Jon). Portals typically provide a predefined set of mini applications or widgets. Mashups allow users to reach outside the organization and combine external feeds with existing data sources to create their own widgets and personlized dashboards.

IBM has developed several technology platforms to assist in the creation of mashups and widgets:

• Mashup hub
• QED wiki (screencast here)

These technologies are being fed into IBM’s commercial application Lotus Mashups which enables instant deployment of custom mashup widgets (which Jon described as “prepackaged application components”).

IBM of course is not the only company developing and producing widgets and mashup technology. The amount of innovation going on in the mashup/widget space is extraordinary. However, this also represents one of the biggest challenges facing the industry: interoperability.

The Open Ajax Alliance is working to create the Open Ajax Metadata wrapper standard, as well as open source transcoders for various proprietary widget formats to allow different mashup technologies to work together easily.

The other major challenge of course is security. IBM and the Open Ajax Alliance are developing and promoting a secure runtime environment for mashups, that is being dubbed, appropriately, “SMASH” (for Secure Mashups).

Jon Ferraiolo will present “The Power of Mashup Technology—Helping the Enterprise Meet the Promise of Web 2.0 and SOA” at DIALOG 08 on Monday Feb 25th, 11.30 am - 12.00 pm.

Web 2.0, Mashups, SOA: Probably the top three buzzwords around at the moment in enterprise IT. All credit to Jon Ferraiolo, then, for managing to squeeze all three of them into the title of his DIALOG 08 keynote presentation (just edging out fellow IBM colleague Sandy Carter who managed only two out of three for her “New Language of Business” keynote earlier the same morning!)

But nobody can accuse Jon Ferraiolo of jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. In fact, Jon is probably about as far as you can get from being an upstart fly-by-night, here-today-gone-tomorrow hipster.

As director of operations for the OpenAjax Alliance (the primary standards and advocacy group for Ajax), Jon has been working feverishly within IBM’s Emerging Technologies group and The OpenAjax Alliance since 2006 to help establish key mashup standards that will allow the industry to achieve the full benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Before joining IBM, Jon worked for Adobe for 13 years as product manager, architect, and engineering manager on products that included Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop and was also principal architect for Adobe’s SVG product efforts.

In presenting mashups as a revolutionary new approach to application development, Jon will draw on his vast experience and knowledge of the field and provide a compelling argument as to why businesses must embrace Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 approaches if they hope to remain competitive.

Originally planned as part of the conference’s Visualization track, Jon’s session was deemed to have such broad appeal and relevance that it was promoted to a cross-track keynote - kind of appropriate for a presentation about mashups, I think :-).

I, for one, will be all ears.