Today is a special day for us. After two years of steadily growing Tellago, we have decided to launch a new company to focus on building enterprise software. In principle the idea  is very simple,  we want to translate the lessons we have learned in our continuous work with customers into enterprise software solutions that reflect the latest architecture and technology best practices and at the same time remain simple and practical to use.

At Tellago, we have a passion for innovation and we are very proud of having built a team that includes some of the top thought leaders in the developer communities. Many of us serve as advisors to software companies such as Microsoft or Oracle which put us on a unique position to effectively leverage the latest technologies in our daily work with customers. However, technology expertise and passion for innovation are not sufficient to build effective software and we try to complement eelements with the lessons we have learned when applying these technologies in some of the largest and most complex IT environments in the world.  Our first product, SO-Aware™, is a perfect example of an effort that combines technology expertise, passion for innovation and being very receptive to the realities faced by customers in the real word  enterprise.

SO-Aware?

SO-Aware is a Web Services repository that enables the cataloging, management, monitoring and testing of Web Services. Contrasted against the complexity of traditional UDDI-centric SOA governance products, SO-Aware uses a simple and unique design based on the principles of REST and OData which enables the manipulation of service artifacts using standard http verbs like GETs or POSTs. Whether SO-Aware can manage Web Services developed on any technology stack, it excels in the management of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) solution enabling capabilities that are very needed in enterprise SOA-WCF solutions. Specifically, the first version of SO-Aware focuses on the following aspects:

• Service cataloging:SO-Aware provides the infrastructure to organize different versions of web services using a simple category-based taxonomy. SO-Aware extends these capabilities beyond traditional SOAP services by supporting REST and OData  services.
• Centralized configuration management: SO-Aware provides a creative model for the centralization and configuration of WCF services and endpoints that removes the need for maintaining large and complex configuration files. Additionally, SO-Aware facilitates the modeling and creating of configuration artifacts such as bindings or behaviors in a way that is accessible to non-WCF  experts.
• Testing:The first release of SO-Aware includes a sophisticated testing subsystem that enables the testing of WCF services. The tests created using SO-Aware can either be executed on-demand using the management portal or periodically using the test scheduling system. Additionally, SO-Aware tracks the execution of tests and enables specific analytics that help testers and members of IT operations teams accurately monitor the behavior of the  tests.
• REST-OData API:SO-Aware is 100% OData centric. In that sense, every capability of SO-Aware from service cataloging to testing is accessible through simple HTTP interfaces using OData as the encoding mechanism.
• Service activity monitoring:SO-Aware enables a simple model for tracking the message flow for the various services in your SOA. Using this information, SO-Aware provides specific analytics that help to accurately describe the runtime behavior of services.
• Dependency modeling:Services that depend on other services are very common in SOA environments. SO-Aware enables developers and architects to model the dependencies between services using a simple visual interface included in the management  portal.
• Management Portal:SO-Aware is 100% OData centric. In that sense, every capability of SO-Aware from service cataloging to testing is accessible through simple HTTP interfaces using OData as the encoding mechanism.
• PowerShell provider:SO-Aware can be completely managed using a scripting environment based on Windows PowerShell. The current version of SO-Aware includes a PowerShell provider that contains a large number of commands that abstract the different SO-Aware capabilities.

Community Centric

We at Tellago Studios are firm believers in the power of the developer community to drive the success or failure of software technologies. Consequently, we are committed to make the developer community an integral part of every software solution at Tellago Studios. With SO-Aware, we have spent the last few weeks demoing to some of the most influential developers in the WCF community as well as members of the Microsoft product team. To reaffirm this commitment, WE ARE MAKING THE EXPRESS EDITION OF SO-AWARE AVAILABLE FOR FREE!!! This is a feature-complete release limited to five services. By making this edition of SO-Aware available, we are encouraging the WCF community to try SO-Aware and give us valuable feedback about what to improve on the next version.

Where I can find more information about SO-Aware?

A good first step to learn more about SO-Aware is to watch some of our knowledge based videos at http://tellagostudios.com/videos. This will help you to get a feeling for the capabilities of the products. Additionally, we really encourage you to download the express edition at http://tellagostudios.com/downloadto get started. In the next few days, Microsoft will be publishing several videos about SO-Aware as part of Channel9's endpoint TV show http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/.  Additionally, you will find regular content about SO-Aware and Tellago Studios at our product blog http://tellagostudios.com/blog.  

What's next for Tellago Studios?

The release of SO-Aware is a big milestone for Tellago Studios and we are going to put a lot of energy on improving it based on your feedback. However, by the time you are reading this blog post we should be back working on the design and prototype of our next solutions. As firm believers in the agile and lean software development methodologies, you should expect continuous releases on our different products.

Acknowledgments

During the last few months, SO-Aware evolved from being a prototype to a robust software technology by embracing the invaluable feedback of some of our customers, partners and other members of the development community. Our first thanks has to go to our staff at Tellago that have contributed in a lot of ways to both Tellago Studios and SO-Aware. We are also thankful to a group of our customers who believed in the concept and our ability to execute and who helped to improved the product with their constant feedback. A special mention to our business partners at Pluralsight and other members of the development community or Microsoft product teams who took the time to participate on various demonstrations of SO-Aware as well as brainstorming sessions that contributed to improve the feature set of the product.

I hope you are as excited about SO-Aware as we are. This is hopefully just the start of a long journey for Tellago Studios. Please go to our website, give it a try with our express version and bombard us with your feedback. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Jesus Rodriguez

• Jesus Rodriguez's blog