- Cape Clear ESB vendor acquired
- SOA Consortium adds Sun
- BEA linking ERP, ESB
- BEA, Accenture partner on innovation center
- SOA spec goes to OASIS committee
- Microsoft services engine readied for SOA
- SOA approaches pondered
- MuleSource to trot out hosted ESB
- Forrester's Latest Take on SOA
- OASIS tackles SOA specs
February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Cape Clear ESB vendor acquired
On-demand business services vendor Workday has acquired enterprise service bus vendor Cape Clear Software, Workday said on Wednesday.
The Cape Clear ESB already is a component of every Workday deployment; it will no longer be offered as a standalone product and will be available only as part of the Workday Integration On Demand package. The acquisition will allow Workday to accelerate customer support packages, Workday said. Workday was started by former PeopleSoft CEO David Duffield.
Existing Cape Clear customers will continue to be supported by Workday.
Cape Clear is to become Workday's integration team based in Dublin, Ireland. Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear, will become vice president of integration at Workday.
"This could be the day that the middleware industry finally broke the mold on how to deliver integration technology — this could also be the day that SOA finally stood up and announced its intention to be a real driver of business value, and not just a driver of technology innovation," O'Toole said in a blog entry.
"For those of you who may be a little surprised at a hosted applications company buying an SOA and ESB company, you shouldn’t be. This is really the logical outcome of many of the things I’ve written about on these pages over the last several years," said O'Toole.
O'Toole said Cape Clear and Workday share a vision of how applications should work.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released; the purchase is expected to be completed in 30 days.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 6, 2008 05:37 PM
February 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The SOA Consortium has added Sun Microsystems as a high-level Sponsor member, the consortium said on Monday.
Formed a year ago, the consortium advocates SOA adoption by Global 100 companies, government agencies and mid-market businesses. The organization is scheduled to disband in 2010.
“Sun is pleased to be an advocate for the SOA Consortium and the important work it does in moving the industry toward a distributed service-oriented enterprise environment based on open standards,” said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal, in a statement released by the consortium.
Influencing standards organizations is a goal of the group as well as the exchange of "real-world" insights, redirection of the industry conversation to "business-driven SOA" and influencing technology vendors and service providers.
Other Sponsor-level members include Cisco, IBM, SAP and Sparx Systems. Participant members include organizations such as Software AG, Avis Budget Car Rental and Wells Fargo Bank.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 4, 2008 11:18 AM
December 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
BEA Systems on Thursday is announcing BEA SmartConnect 3.0, which connects the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus ESB to ERP and packaged applications.
Service-enablement is key to the product.
SmartConnect 3.0 lets these applications be plugged into the ESB without having to write code. "That last mile, when you get to that ERP or packaged application, normally requires custom integration," said Paul Patrick, BEA vice president and chief architect. "We've now taken that need for you to do custom integration away through these smart connections."
Users can start small SOA-based integration or ERP connectivity and move to an enterprise-wide, multi-domain project, BEA said.
SmartConnect links to ERP packages in native mode; "smart" adapters offered as part of SmartConnect can be plugged in as SOAP-based services. There currently is no support for REST (Representational state Transfer) Web services but BEA is looking into adding that capability to the ESB itself, Patrick said.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 13, 2007 12:01 AM
November 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)
BEA, Accenture partner on innovation center
Accenture and BEA Systems are announcing the opening Thursday of the "Accenture Innovation Center for BEA," located at BEA headquarters in San Jose, Calif.
Clients using the center can work with BEA and Accenture to build solutions such as SOA and "dynamic" business applications, the companies said. The center will be headed by Robert Calloway, lead of Accenture's SOA practice in North America. The facility will provide a collaborative environment for testing conceptual solutions and expanded uses of BEA technology.
Users can access integration and business process management assets that have helped companies such as Pacific Gas & Electric; expertise from BEA and Accenture and integration business process management best practices.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 29, 2007 08:47 AM
November 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
SOA spec goes to OASIS committee
OASIS said on Thursday it has formed a technical committee to advance the Service Data Objects (SDO) specification, which is intended to simplify the way SOA applications handle data.
With SDO, application programmers can access and manipulate data from heterogeneous sources such as relational databases, XML data sources, Web services and enterprise information systems.
"By offering a common facility for representing collections of data, regardless of data source type, SDO gives application developers a more simple, unified programming model and enables tools to work across heterogeneous data sources consistently," said Shawn Moe of IBM, who is convening the OASIS SDO Technical Committee, in a statement released by OASIS.
The committee will be affiliated with the OASIS Open Services Architecture Member Section, where the Service Component Architecture (SCA) family of specifications is being developed. SDO is part of SCA. Together they define a language-neutral programming model letting developers exploit SOA, OASIS said.
SCA has been focused on defining models to build and assemble service components to for SOA. SDO is intended to provide a consistent method for data-handling within SOA applications. The technologies were turned over to OASIS in March.
SCA and SDO were launched in late-2005, with the support of companies such as BEA Systems, IBM and Oracle. BEA, IBM, Progress Software and SAP issued statements supporting formation of the committee.
"(SDO) is a standard that can help enable a service-oriented approach to data integration, which represents a critical aspect of any comprehensive SOA platform deployment," said Ed Cobb, vice president of Emerging Technology and Standards at BEA, in a statement released by OASIS.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 15, 2007 04:14 PM
October 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft services engine readied for SOA
Microsoft is touting its Managed Services Engine (MSE), featuring a virtualization approach for enterprise SOA.
The technology is featured on the company's CodePlex site for hosting of open source projects.
Developed by Microsoft Services, MSE leverages service virtualization through a service repository, enabling organizations to deploy services faster, coordinate change management and maximize reuse, according to the Web page describing the project. The Version 6.2 CTP (Community Technology Preview) offered this week constitutes the first publicly shared release of MSE.
"The Managed Services Engine is one approach to facilitating Enterprise SOA through service virtualization. Built upon the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Microsoft Server Platform, the MSE was developed by Microsoft Services as we helped customers address the challenges of SOA in the enterprise," Microsoft said.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 31, 2007 05:08 PM
June 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
SOA promises enormous benefits but is anyone realizing them?
Analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, asked this question Thursday during a presentation on SOA at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco.
SOA, she said, offers benefits such as aligning IT with the business and providing flexibility and agility. But it is a long road to get to the benefits, she said.
"My contention is an awful lot of companies are really not ready to do SOA," Manes said.
She stressed SOA is an enterprise architecture design methodology and is not about technology. "SOA is how how you think about solving the problem," Manes said.
Vendors say to buy their new products for SOA, even if a lot of them are the same products that have been around for 15 years but with a couple of new features, Manes said. Technology only provides the raw materials, she said.
"It's up to you to use those raw materials correctly," Manes said.
She also questioned the viability of the WS-* Web services specifications. "The question is, is WS-* (spoken as ws star) the true path to SOA," Manes said. WS-* has been viewed as burdened with excessive complexity, according to Manes. She noted, though, that WS-* specifications such as WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) are now being ratified. She advised attendees not to abandon WS-*.
Manes has endorsed the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) Basic Profile.
REST (Representational State Transfer) also has gained traction in Web services and SOA, she noted. But the REST design model is unfamiliar to many developers, she noted.
In another presentation at the conference, Kevin Kosienski, enterprise architect at MassMutual Financial Group, concurred with Manes about SOA.
"We view SOA as an architectural style. It's not a technology," Kosienski said. SOA involves converting complex systems into simpler sets of services and assembling them as enterprise-class applications, he said. MassMutual views SOA as an architectural style that will enable a more flexible, adaptable business model, said Kosienski.
MassMutual's SOA leverages AmberPoint management software. SOA management tackles security tasks and alleviates developers from having to deal with these issues, Kosienski said.
Also in the SOA arena this week, a BEA Systems official stressed the human factor of SOA in a keynote presentation at the SOA World conference in New York, the official said when interviewed afterward.
During the presentation, Rob Levy, BEA CTO, said human ability has been pushed out of the IT process through increased efficiency and mechanization of processes. But humans nonetheless find a way to surpass all this, he said.
Now, Web 2.0 and social computing concepts have emerged. The next generation of SOA applications needs to cater to human nature and collaboration, he said.
"We believe the next wave of SOA will bring Web 2.0-like capabilities into the enterprise," Levy said.
"In a collaborative environment, everybody has an opinion and eventually, the opinion that is correct will prevail," he said.
By bringing enveryone into an SOA lifecycle, it will take less time to implement an idea, said Levy.
To bolster the human factor in SOA, BEA in July plans to deliver its three social computing products under the AquaLogic nameplate. These include: Ensemble, enabling Web developers to build developer-oriented mashups; Pages, for business users to build mashups for business situations, and Pathways, for forming social networks in an enterprise context.
"These are tools that allow things like wikis inside the enterprise," Levy said.
Anchoring BEA's platform is AquaLogic Repository, providing governance capabilities enabling the IT department to oversee what is happening in an SOA.
Posted by Paul Krill on June 28, 2007 02:54 PM
May 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
MuleSource to trot out hosted ESB
Open source enterprise service bus maker MuleSource is getting ready to offer ESB-based integration services in a hosted, SaaS fashion.
The service will be "ESB in the cloud," said MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon. MuleSource plans to offer the service via a partnership with SaaS delivery vendor OpSource.
"It will be the full functionally that you would get out of the service bus now, operating online and you'll be able to connect to it over the Internet," Rosenberg said. MuleSource currently offers the Mule ESB.
Users at both the enterprise and small-business levels will be able to link data and applications.
"Let's say if I'm using salesforce.com and I have either an enterprise app or I have two on-demand apps and I want them to talk to each other and I want to transfer data from one to the other. You'll be able to do that across the bus," Rosenberg said.
The service will provide transformation and protocol routing as well as the ability to break messages apart and store and forward. "It's a literal bus in the cloud," said Rosenberg.
"Our focus is really on pushing enterprise data out to the cloud and being able to get data back in securely," he said. Connectivity between applications will be done through a simple, defined schema, Rosenberg said.
Availability is targeted for the third or fourth quarter of this year.
MuleSource's effort is similar to Microsoft's recently announced BizTalk Services, which is an Internet-hosted platform featuring an "Internet Services Bus" that can offer data connectivity between end points as well as workflow and identity and access management.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 23, 2007 05:01 PM
April 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Forrester's Latest Take on SOA
One of our all-time favorite industry analysts, Forrester's Randy Heffner, has just published a new report on SOA adoption based on a monster survey of thousands of enterprises and SMBs. His most startling finding: While 14 percent of North American and European businesses said they would adopt SOA in 2006, only 2 percent did. Put another way, actual SOA usage rose from 39 percent to just 41 percent. As Randy dryly notes, "it is apparently easier to say that a firm will adopt SOA than it is to make specific plans and follow through on them."
Randy's report goes on to say that, despite falling short in actual implementation, businesses' depth and breadth of commitment to SOA is on the upswing, especially among larger companies. Optimism knows no bounds: 75 percent of the Global 2000, for example, claim they will adopt SOA by the end of 2007.
The implication of the report is clear. SOA sounds great, but boy, is it hard. Especially on a wide scale, because doing it right generally requires rethinking how IT is organized. Right now just about everyone believes that SOA is the only way to achieve the Holy Grail of true enterprise agility (that is, a flexible app infrastructure that adapts to changing business processes). But if that was easy, we would have gotten there a long time ago.
Posted by Eric Knorr on April 13, 2007 02:02 PM
April 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
OASIS announced on Wednesday formation of the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section, which is an initiative to advance standards that simplify SOA.
Open CSA will promote development of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications.
SCA is intended to enable design and transformation of IT assets into reusable services. SDO lets programmers access and manipulate data from heterogeneous services, such as databases, XML data services and Web services. OASIS has been selected as the venue for advancing these specifications.
The Open CSA Member Section will oversee new OASIS Technical Committees for SCA and SDO. Members of the Open CSA initiative include companies such as BEA Systems, Oracle, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
Posted by Paul Krill on April 11, 2007 07:16 AM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
IBM on Monday plans to announce another expansion of its SOA software and services.
With Monday's unveiling, the company believes it is further enabling organizations to more easily embed integration capabilities within SOA-driven processes.
Featured as part of the announcement is IBM Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) Version 3, developed by IBM Global Business Services as an approach to implementing a long-term plan to move to SOA. The new version supports IBM's Information as a Service concept, which is a strategy to access information independent of the source and convert it into a specific business service.
SOMA offers a blueprint for incorporating data integration and master data management within an SOA, with models that help align an architecture with business goals.
Also to be announced is WebSphere Information Analyzer, which is a new module for the IBM Information Server that helps eliminate the risk of reusing bad data. Information Analyzer profiles data and understands the quality and content of data sources while creating a metadata map of source systems, IBM said. Information Server is an IBM data integration software package.
New capabilities in IBM Information Server, meanwhile, complement IBM WebSphere Process Server to enable tighter integration between information and business processes. These services activities within Process Server expose data integration tasks from IBM Information Server so they can support capabilities within business processes. Users can browse services and view and reuse metadata and ensure efficient interaction between Web services and data integration tasks, according to IBM.
IBM also will announce an extension to Rational Data Architect to help provide more value from IBM industry-specific data models. The Enterprise Model Extender helps organizations in banking, financial markets, insurance and other industries to get more value out of IBM Industry Data Models.
IBM has had a series of programs and products targeting SOA deployments. In October, IBM grew its SOA efforts with programs, services and partner incentives that included the development of SOA Specialty Wikis for vertical industries. Last March, the company launched efforts to bring small and midsized businesses into the SOA fold.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 26, 2007 06:18 AM
January 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Tibco Software on Wednesday is announcing that it has become a sponsor of Direct Web Remoting (DWR), which is an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) communication library.
The sponsorship will aid developers in exposing Java objects as AJAX services and extending message- and event-driven SOA into Web browsers via real-time AJAX services, the company said in a statement.
"DWR is a rapid way for Java developers to expose Java objects as simple AJAX services without the need for additional configuration or transformation. We have many customers already using DWR with the General Interface AJAX library," said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing for Tibco General Interface, in a statement released by the company. "With DWR's reverse AJAX capability, messages and events can be pushed from the server to the browser so that Web applications can also have real-time notification and streaming data features."
Tibco will work with Joe Walker, the founder of DWR, to integrate DWR with the Tibco General Interface AJAX toolkit for building graphical UIs in a browser. Also, Tibco will seek to extend DWR so it can function as a Java Business Integration standard service engine and be deployed on the Tibco ActiveMatrix service virtualization platform.
Combining AJAX libraries from General Interface and DWR will provide capabilities to deliver rich user features such as editable grids, real-time events and notifications and streaming data, Tibco said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 10, 2007 05:33 AM
December 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
More than 40 percent of developers working on SOA compete a typical development within three months, according to an Evans Data study to be released on Friday.
This figure is more than twice the number of developers that accomplished this a year ago, Evans said. The Evans Data 2006 Web Services Development Survey also said more than 60 percent of SOA projects are completed within six months.
The survey results were cited as evidence of dramatic productivity increases by Evans, which noted the improvements are concurrent with developers' embrace of .Net and Java for SOA in almost equal numbers.
Additionally, the number of companies with more than 40 Web services in production has doubled in two years, Evans said. The figure is expected to double again in the next year.
"We are now moving from the SOA pilot stage into full live deployments taking advantage of the reuse of frameworks and services thus driving the much-improved productivity curve," said John Andrews, Evans Data's president, in a statement released by the company. "This adoption highlights the proven benefits that both the IT and line of business organizations achieve through their SOA efforts."
The survey gauged the perspectives of more than 400 Web services developers.
In other findings in the survey:
* Evans found that half of developers working on Web services use AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or plan to do so in the next 12 months, an increase of 45 percent from six months ago.
* Determining return on investment in SOA is considered the top challenge to SOA deployments, followed by achieving organizational buy-in.
* In three years, two of three SOA developers will be running most of their applications in managed code.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 20, 2006 07:01 AM
October 24, 2006 | Comments: (0)
OASIS approves SOA reference model
OASIS this week announced its approval of its Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA-RM) 1.0 as an OASIS Standard.
SOA-RM provides an abstract framework for understanding the significant entities and relationships within a SOA, OASIS said.
The standard enables development of specific reference or concrete architectures using consistent standards. But SOA-RM is not tied any specific Web services standards, technologies or other implementation details; it instead offers common semantics for use across and between implementations.
OASIS officials released prepared statements pertaining to the standard.
"The approval of the SOA reference model is a significant step forward in enabling increased SOA interoperability and service re-use within and between organizations that adopt SOA," said William Barnhill, associate at Booz Allen Hamilton and a member of the OASIS Technical Advisory Board.
"There are many different definitions of SOA being used in the marketplace today," said Duane Nickull of Adobe Systems, chair of the OASIS SOA-RM Technical Committee. "By providing a clear, singular point of reference, the SOA-RM enables even those with unique ideas about SOA to describe their work in quantifiable terms that can be commonly understood."
"SOA-RM offers us a much-needed vocabulary for communicating an organization's services architecture. It delivers a standard reference that will remain relevant as a powerful model, useful across SOA deployments with evolving technologies," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 24, 2006 01:49 PM
September 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Will Tiger help you birdie SOA?
Accenture, one of the largest management consulting firms in the world with over $15 billion in revenues, announced today it resigned Tiger Woods as its spokesman.
No mention was made of how many millions of shareholder money went into enticing the golf superstar into another multi-year contract.
But with the cost of a consulting contract with Accenture also going into seven digits I wonder how many companies will actually make a decision based on what famous personality pitches for it?
Or is there more to it?
Does Accenture promise to offer up Tiger for free golf lessons to the board of directors when the company signs on the dotted line?
What does it say about corporate due diligence if a company selects a supplier based on the fact that they might meet a huge sports superstar?
Is it something like when one of our past presidents allowed major donors to sleep in the White House?
At least when you got to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom there was also the hint that you would get the ear of the president and perhaps influence him on a pending piece of legislation.
Will Tiger be any help if you need to rip and replace your current network and create an SOA?
Are there any advertising gurus out there who can tell me that having Tiger Woods as a spokesman will actually increase the bottom line? If there are, I'd like to hear from you.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2006 01:38 PM
September 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
BEA Systems Chairman/CEO Alfred Chuang on Tuesday touted BEA's SOA 360 platform, which takes all of the company's technology and puts it under a single environment for SOA.
While Chuang did not provide many specific details, he attempted to express the essence of the platform, which he said separates applications from the business process.
Featured in the platform is a microservice architecture built with SOA principals in mind, Chuang said. Interfaces are exposed for third parties to take advantage of, he said. The architecture features third party products as well as BEA's Tuxedo and AquaLogic products.
The Workspace 360 component of SOA 360 offers a platform for developing, deploying and maintaining SOA applications and also for future upgrades. It is designed to bring enterprise architects, business analysts and developers to the same table.
"BEA SOA 360 is the company's competitive weapon that will enable the company to deliver innovation that can adapt faster and more flexibly to changing business conditions," according to BEA.
Chuang's presentation has focused pretty much exclusively on SOA. "I'm here to tell you with confidence that SOA is very real," Chuang said.
BEA also touted its Guardian Support Services offering for pre-emptive IT support.
(By Paul Krill, reporting live from the BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco conference.)
Posted by Paul Krill on September 19, 2006 10:22 AM
September 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Linking Cobol to SOA made easier
Leveraging legacy applications in modern environments such as SOA remains an ongoing issue for enterprises. To help with this transition, BluePhoenix Solutions on September 18 is announcing the release of a platform to redevelop legacy Cobol applications for use in environments such as SOA, Java and C#.
Called BluePhoenix Redevelopment, the product set features a toolset, methodology and services. It is to be showcased at the Gartner Application Development Summit in Phoenix beginning September 25. The company cited Temenos, a Swiss-based provider of integrated core banking systems, as a user. Temenos used the platform to move Cobol applications to Java.
"By redeveloping these applications, our customers will have the ability to operate on less costly hardware and software environments, while maintaining platform and vendor independence," said Andreas Andreades, CEO of Temenos, in a statement released by BluePhoenix.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 15, 2006 05:00 PM
September 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
IBM readies SOA skills curricula
IBM is working with Georgetown University to address the current IT skills shortage in the United States and advance SOA.
The two organizations at an event in Washington, DC are announcing two curricula, one for IT professionals and one for undergraduates and graduates, which are designed to teach about SOA. The SOA Curricula for IT professionals features a three-day workshop focused on "real world" SOA skills while the curricula for students features an opportunity to take courses as part of a Computer Science major to learn SOA basics.
The SOA Curricula is expected to start next spring. IBM WebSphere integration middleware will be featured in the courses.
Parts of the curricula will be available to members of the IBM Academic Initiative, which includes a network of 1,900 universities worldwide. In addition to working with Georgetown, IBM also is aligned with the College of Charleston and George Mason University to develop curricula addressing the pending workplace skills shortage.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 14, 2006 12:19 PM
July 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Four testing and quality assurance vendors, Mindreef, Solstice Software, Parasoft and iTKO, this week joined SOA Link, an industry initiative geared toward SOA governance.
SOA Link is driven by Infravio and also has featured members such as Hewlett-Packard, Iona and JBoss.
Mindreef intends for its products to help assure service quality and reliability as part of SOA Link. The company offers Mindreef SOAPscope Server, a solution for SOA system component testing.
Parasoft offers automated error prevention products for software development and is looking to SOA Link to assist in boosting quality. The company offers an "SOA-aware testing framework," called Parasoft SOAtest.
Solstice Software provides Solstice Integra Suite, for end-to-end integration and testing. The company plans to identify governance and testing use cases as part of SOA Link.
SOA testing vendor iTKO also joined SOA Link.
A debate ensued at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco last month questioning the need for two industry initiatives for SOA governance, with SOA Link pitted against the Governance Interoperability Framework, led by Systinet.
Posted by Paul Krill on July 14, 2006 03:55 PM
July 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
iTKO said Monday it had joined SOA Link, what it called "an initiative for the purpose of making multiple SOA product vendors' offerings interoperable".
The move bulks up SOA Link, which includes companies such as AmberPoint, HP, Infravio, IONA, JBoss, NetIQ, Parasoft, and webMethods. Rival group Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) includes companies such as Actional, Hewlett-Packard, and Reactivity.
Panelists from technology companies in the governance space debated whether two groups were needed at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference last month.
By joining SOA Link, iTKO, which provides complete testing solutions for SOA, said in a statement it plans to promote the concept "that everyone should own quality and should be working to enhance the quality of SOA applications".
It said SOA Link participants benefited by having the ability to publish services and policy in a standardized way, and by being alerted to changes.
"SOA Link gets to the heart of what we have been trying to accomplish," said Jim Mackay, chief marketing officer, iTKO, Inc.
"While the current standards enable widespread adoption of SOA, supporting the ever-growing set of integration points between the elements of the infrastructure increases the complexity and risk of enterprise development.
"SOA Link ensures that all of these organizations work together for interoperability so the end user will be able to better integrate Service Oriented Architectures into their businesses. It is a win-win for everyone involved."
The company said that a customer buying SOA Link solutions can be assured they will work together to solve the problem of end-to-end SOA Lifecycle Governance.
Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, Inc. (organizer of the SOA Link initiative), said: "The more quality vendors that we can get to work together and publish services, the more widely adopted SOAs will become."
But, despite the bulking up, no standard remains for SOA interoperability as long as two groups operate independently. As one panelist at the conference last month said, "It doesn't benefit to have a standard that is not a standard."
Can't we all just get along, SOA players? Talk back to us...
Posted by Mike Barton on July 10, 2006 10:45 AM
June 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Oracle on Monday is again promoting the concept of SOA 2.0, with the release of Oracle Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Suite, featuring Oracle Fusion Middleware products.
The middleware offerings allow customers to identify, analyze and respond to business events in real-time. EDA is a key component of SOA 2.0 which, according to Oracle, is the next-generation of SOA that defines how events and services are linked together to deliver a responsive and flexible IT infrastructure.
Featured in the suite are:
* Oracle Enterprise Messaging, to deliver event messages.
* Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, to collect and distribute events.
* Oracle Business Rules, for defining business policies on events.
* Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, to monitor and analyze events.
* Oracle Sensor Edge Server, supporting RFID and managing events from physical sensors and automation equipment.
Oracle pitched the concept of SOA 2.0 at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in May. The analysis firm, Gartner, also is promoting it.
Not everyone is enthralled with the creation of the concept, SOA 2.0. An online petition against it is even in circulation.
Posted by Paul Krill on June 19, 2006 10:58 AM
June 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Web-oriented architecture in focus
First, there was SOA. Then Web 2.0. And most recently, SOA 2.0. Now, Gartner is promoting a concept it has dubbed Web-oriented architecture.
"What we're trying to do at Gartner is, if at all possible, start to clarify some of the overlapping concepts and terminology around SOA and Web 2.0 and all that good stuff," said Nick Gall, vice president and Gartner fellow. He will present on Web-oriented architecture at the Gartner Application Integration & Web Services Summit, which begins on June 19 in San Diego.
The term, Web-oriented architecture, was coined to describe a subset of SOA that fits the architecture of the Web, Gall said. The concept features attributes of SOA, in which systems are modular, distributable and shareable, plus Web attributes such as URLS to point to resources, decentralization and the use of dynamic mediation for communication between two endpoints.
SOA is not necessarily synonymous with the Web, according to Gall. An SOA may feature old habits developed through the use of middleware or conventional, object-oriented architecture, he said. "What [users] end up with is an SOA that is more tightly coupled than the Web is," said Gall.
"To us, Web-oriented architecture is really just the architecture of the World Wide Web as it was originally designed," he said.
"What we're trying to highlight is the Web in Web services," Gall said.
A Web-oriented architecture enables development of systems that have the flexibility of the Web, he said. Companies such as Amazon, Google and eBay, with their public-facing Web services, provide examples of Web-oriented architecture, Gall said.
Posted by Paul Krill on June 9, 2006 04:32 PM
June 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
SOA: Concept gains traction, lacks understanding
SOA is gaining in popularity even though many do not fully understand its concepts, according to a survey conducted by consulting firm Capgemini.
A survey of more than 1,000 attendees at the recent SAP Sapphire Orlando and SAP Sapphire Paris events found that organizations will on the average increase the percentage of applications run on SOA by 20 percent during the next three years. Chief reasons for utilizing SOA include innovation, compliance and the speed of change.
More than one-third of respondents, however, did not fully understand the concepts of SOA.
Top benefits cited from SOA include increased flexibility, lower software integration costs and better alignment of IT and business goals. The biggest obstacles include lack of understanding, difficulty in justifying ROI and a shortage of skills.
North American organizations expect to increase SOA adoption at a faster pace than in Europe, Capgemini said. Sixty-seven percent of North American respondents are expected to push for their organizations to run between 20 percent to 60 percent of their applications on SOA-based technology within three years. The same percentage of European respondents expect to run only as much as 40 percent of their applications on SOA.
Posted by Paul Krill on June 8, 2006 11:49 AM
May 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
SOA governance initiative launched
SOA Link, an initiative to boost interoperability of SOA governance products, was launched Monday by Infravio and several other vendors.
The effort is intended to enable publishing of services and associated policy to Infravio's X-Registry in a standardized way and enable the receiving of alerts when changes happen, Infravio said. X-Registry is a UDDI-compatible registry.
SOA Link does not, however, mandate a single API but is a public statement by partners pledging interoperability. Customers buying SOA Link solutions are assured these products will work together.
Other participants in SOA Link include AmberPoint, Composite Software, Forum Systems, Intalio, Iona, JBoss, Layer 7 Technologies, LogicBlaze, NetIQ, ParaSoft, Reactivity, SOA Software, SymphonySoft, and webMethods. WSO2, which had been included on an initial list of participants, was not on a later, more current list.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 1, 2006 05:26 AM
April 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Sun Microsystems on Friday championed its SOA platform at a press "Chalk Talk" session in San Francisco and took a few obligatory potshots at IBM and BEA Systems along the way.
Describing SOA as a technology enabling users to reuse existing services, build new ones and save money, Sun officials hailed their own technology stack. Key to this stack is the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS), which features technology acquired when Sun bought SeeBeyond last year.
The platform is available as part of the Sun Java Enterprise System infrastructure software package or separately. Version 5.1 of CAPS shipped two weeks ago, featuring an enhanced portal.
Version 5.1.1, due later this year, will offer performance and quality improvements while version 5.2, due in a year, will boost Web services interoperability and productivity. CAPS version 6, planned for release in two years, will offer support for the Java Business Integration specification and the Service Component Architecture.
Sun officials said their own offerings are more integrated than IBM and also questioned IBM's claim of having 1,000 SOA installation.
"Just within IBM, you have three application servers that are incompatible with one another," said Mark Bauhaus, senior vice president for the App Platform and Identity Management Software at Sun. IBM's application servers referred to included the enterprise version of WebSphere, WebSphere Express and the Gluecode product.
"It's integration by brand, not in actual technology," said Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for SOA and integration platforms at Sun.
Sun also does not need a services organization the size of IBM Global Services to provide professional services, the Sun officials said. BEA, meanwhile, does not have a unified code base, the Sun officials claimed.
Sun delivers a multiplatform offering for SOA that functions with both Sun's Solaris OS as well as with rival platforms such as IBM AIX. It also works with multiple application servers such as WebSphere or JBoss, according to Sun.
Microsoft and Sun, meanwhile, plan to announce at the JavaOne conference in May some news pertaining to Web services interoperability.
"We'll be showing the next chapter of Web services interoperability," Bauhaus said. He declined to elaborate. Sun and Microsoft have been working to make their technologies interoperable as part of a 2004 agreement.
Prior to then, the two companies competed with dueling Web services specifications such as Sun's Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) technology and the Microsoft- and IBM-driven driven Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) specification. BPEL won that battle.
These days, WSCI is "dropping by the wayside, frankly," Bauhaus said.
Posted by Paul Krill on April 7, 2006 03:39 PM
March 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)
IBM readies app server in SOA play
IBM on Monday will host a teleconference regarding IBM's SOA direction, which will include a new version of IBM WebSphere Application Server, according to a source familiar with the announcement.
Featuring a presentation from IBM Senior Vice President and Software Group Executive Steve Mills, the announcement is intended to build on IBM's strategy to leverage software and services to help customers derive business benefits from SOA.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 30, 2006 09:14 AM
March 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
BEA buys BPM vendor to boost SOA
BEA Systems on Wednesday announced its $87.5 million acquisition of Fuego, a business process management software (BPM) company.
Fuego helps customers improve workflow with SOA/BPM solutions. FuegoBPM is an advanced software platform for business process management, according to BEA. Fuego customers include Southwest Airlines, United Healthcare, JPMorganChase and British Petrolem.
The Fuego portfolio will become part of the BEA AquaLogic product family and serve as the basis for a new AquaLogic Business Service Interaction product line.
The transaction already has closed, according to BEA.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 1, 2006 09:29 AM
February 02, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Moving to service-based architectures certainly has its roadblocks, including convincing higher-ups of the benefits, panelists said at the Software Architecture Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday evening.
But IT persons need to partner with those responsible for the business itself.
"Architects should be partnering with the business side of things," rather than working in isolation, said Jerry Shaughnessy, senior director of architecture at Nexxus Partners.
IT shops should get started on building services, he said. Following on a famous line from the movie, "Field of Dreams," Shaughnessy stressed,"If you build it, they will come."
Shaughnessy said he has written Java interfaces and classes to spur service-oriented deployments. "Once that process gets past a tipping point, we find that the developer is eager to embrace those things, but it's hard to get over that initial hump," he said.
He cited as one benefit of SOA the ability to modify systems without breaking anything, through provision of an abstraction layer.
Dave Chappell, chief technology evangelist at Sonic Software, which makes enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, said organizations need a vision for SOA.
"There's an education and a continual reinforcement that has to occur in order to get your own folks to adopt what you’re trying to do," Chappell said.
An IT official at Uniprise Technologies, which is part of UnitedHealth Group, concurred. "Developers will start to follow if you can show that you're actually improving the environment," said Rod Jardine, director of Enterprise Application Architecture at Uniprise.
IT architects must gauge the financial benefits and performance boosts, Shaughnessy said. "We probably spend about 30 percent of our time identifying how do you prove what you're doing is more cost-efficient in the long run," Shaughnessy said.
Buzzwords are not necessarily helpful, said Shaughnessy. "We get caught in buzzwords and people don't necessarily understand what the buzzwards are," he said.
At Wells Fargo, the company uses special documents to show how the overall architecture is intended to perform. "One of the ways that we address overall change in terms of pattern and usage in our enterprise is we've developed a series of documents called living target architectures," said Jody Kerr, a systems architect at Wells Fargo.
Loose coupling is a critical feature of SOA, according to Chappell.
"The modern approach to SOA has to be based on creating loose coupling between the applications and services that you're connecting together," Chappell said.
But there are potential issues. "I think that the extreme with loose coupling is you're migrating so far away from tightly coupled RPC-style interfaces that you've built one big message-based exchange," he said.
"No matter what you do, you're never going to get it right the first time," said Chappell.
Goverance is crucial, Jardine said. "You've got to train your people to follow the governance," and have a tool to enforce it, he said.
But building an SOA takes time, Jardine stressed.
"We have thousands of services that are still point to point and it's going to get us years to get to an SOA architecture," he said. He added he did not know if his company would ever fully have an SOA.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 2, 2006 08:24 AM
February 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Mercury Interactive completes Systinet acquisition
Mercury Interactive said on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of SOA governance and lifecycle vendor Systinet.
The $105 million deal was announced on January 9.
"Mercury plans to leverage Systinet products to help customers mitigate the risk to business outcomes of SOA initiatives," Mercury said in a prepared statement. "Customers will be able to use Mercury and Systinet offerings to deliver predictable, consistent business results from SOA initiatives; provide the control and visibility required to ensure the reuse of business services; and optimize the quality, performance and availability of SOA applications."
Posted by Paul Krill on February 1, 2006 04:32 PM
February 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft official: "Put the user back into SOA."
SOA development should focus on the user, not on techies, according to a Microsoft official at the Software Architecture Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
The user of services should be at the center of the equation, argued John deVaDoss, director of Architecture Strategy at Microsoft.
"I would say, put the user back into SOA," deVaDoss said.
"You put the user back into SOA, it changes the way we think about services," he said. Users need to be focused on at the design level, said deVaDoss.
Reflecting on computing models of the past, including batch processing, time-sharing and client-server, deVaDoss offered up a new-era model.
"I'm proposing that we're at the cusp of spawning a new model, a model that's based on users and experiences," he stressed.
SOA, he said, is about agility and leveraging new business opportunities and requirements. This needs to be recognized when building architectures, according to deVaDoss.
"Architecture is not the end goal; it is a means to an end," he said.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 1, 2006 01:44 PM
January 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Web services market consolidation continues
Consolidation in the Web services management market clearly has arrived.
Progress Software on Thursday announced its planned $32 million acquisition of Actional, which would become part of Progress's Sonic Software business unit. Sonic has specialized in enterprise service bus (ESB) technology.
"[The acquisition] brings together two really important categories of software, mainly ESB and Web services management technology," said Hub Vandervoort, Sonic CTO.
The deal comes just 10 days after Mercury Interactive announced plans to acquire Systinet, which also has offered Web services management capabilities. In both acquisitions, companies are seeking to leverage the transition to SOA by enterprises.
The deal makes "a ton of sense for Progress," given Progress's ownership of Sonic, said analyst Ronald Schmelzer, of ZapThink, in an email.
"Their ESB product has an ever-increasing footprint and [a] goal to provide as complete as possible infrastructure for running and managing SOA implementations. As such, one of the missing components of their runtime infrastructure was active management as well as more robust security. This is where Actional comes in," Schmelzer said.
"On another note, I think this is a foreboding note for other startups in the industry. It's becoming increasingly difficult to be a small Web Services or SOA-focused startup/pure-play. The larger vendors know that they have to have a comprehensive answer to SOA challenges," Schmelzer said.
"Small companies will either be directly in the competitive path of these large vendors or will be acquisition fodder. Faced with the prospects of competing with much larger vendors, we believe that many will choose acquisition instead of trying to broaden their own capabilities or find deeper pockets. 2006 will bear out to be the year of super-consolidation for the SOA markets," said Schmelzer.
The marriage between Sonic and Actional could have some complications, however. Sonic previously has partnered with another Web services management vendor, AmberPoint.
Sonic has in fact partnered with both AmberPoint and Actional, but it is likely that AmberPoint may begin to distance itself from Sonic, Vandervoort said. But that would be AmberPoint's choice, he said.
Actional already has had partners that also have been competitors, said David Gehringer, Actional vice president of product of marketing. He cited Cisco Systems as one example. "Yet, we've had a very fruitful partnership with them," Gehringer said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 19, 2006 10:21 AM
January 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Mercury buys Systinet for SOA governance
Mercury Interactve on Monday announced its acquisition of Systinet for $105 million in cash.
Systinet's technology for SOA governance and lifecycle management will be combined with Mercury Business Technology Optimization offerings. This is intended to enable customers to take a "lifecycle" approach to optimizing quality, performance and availability of SOA business services.
Key Systinet products include:
* Systinet Registry, which provides a UDDI-compliant registry for managing and publishing business services and other SOA assets.
* Systinet Policy Manager, for developing policies and managing service validation.
The acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of 2006.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 9, 2006 11:58 AM
January 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)
SOA skepticism subsiding, researcher says
Skepticism over SOA is giving way to adoption, according to IT advisory and research firm Nucleus Research.
The lofty promises of SOA in the areas of enterprise integration and software reusability had fueled this skepticism, Nucleus said in a statement it released about SOA. But implementers now are benefitting from SOA, which Nucleus defines as "the practice of building platform-independent pieces of software that are defined according to a specific business process and readily adapted for reuse."
Implementers leverage SOA to save money, speed up projects and reduce programming costs, Nucleus said.
Reuse of software has been a key benefit. "SOA reuse is now enhanced by the adoption of standards, which in turn enables reuse," according to Nucleus.
An SOA should be business process-driven, focus on reuse, deploy metadata and allow loose coupling via messaging software and metadata, Nucleus said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 5, 2006 04:46 PM
December 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Iona Technologies and ObjectWeb on Thursday said the Celtix open source enterprise service bus (ESB) now compares favorably with commercial ESBs, based on a milestone that has been reached.
The milestone, called Milestone 3, covers transport support, specification compliance and usability. Celtix is intended to provide an open source Java ESB runtime for use in SOA.
"The Celtix community has delivered robust JMS (Java Message Service) support and this, combined with the other features made available in Milestone 3, gives end users a powerful and cost-effective ESB to support their SOA and other integration projects," said Carl Trieloff, director of open source programs at Iona, in a prepared statement released to the press.
Also featured in Milestone 3 is an implementation of HTTP 1.1 and Servlet Transport support, SOAP 1.1 headers and additional support for WS-Addressing and JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services). Additionally, command line tools for WSDL-to-Java and Java-to-WSDL conversions are featured, and the Celtix configuration infrastructure is complete.
Celtix also sports a multiple licensing approach that backs both the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) and the EPL (Eclipse Public License).
Posted by Paul Krill on December 22, 2005 03:46 PM
December 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)
An open source project promoting SOA is afoot at Apache.
Implementations of runtimes for the newly announced Service Component Architecture proposal are being floated at Apache and featured in the organization's Tuscany project. SCA was unveiled last month with the goal of simplifying development of SOA.
"The point of SCA is to produce a simple programming model for SOA and Tuscany is [intended] to give people an open source runtime that they can build SOA components on Java, in C++," and enable these components to work together, said Paul Freemantle, a participant in Apache. He also is a co-founder and vice president of technology at WSO2, a Web services software platform company.
Tuscany is about simplifying SOA via an open source mechanism, that being the Apache model, Freemantle said.
Tuscany presently features Java and C++ implementations of SCA as well as a Java implementation of the related Service Data Objects technology, said Ed Cobb, vice president of architecture and standards at BEA Systems. BEA is participating in SCA, Tuscany and Apache.
Tuscany is in early, incubation status at Apache. The project focuses on service composition and authoring, said Cobb.
"Tuscany is really about kind of the next generation of SOA," Cobb said. Tuscany is likely to extend beyond SCA, said Kenneth Tam, principal technologist BEA.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 12, 2005 05:23 PM
December 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)
JBoss's Fleury pans SOA proposal
Marc Fleury, the brash founder, chairman and CEO of open source software vendor JBoss, has harsh words for the recently announced Service Component Architecture (SCA) proposal put forth as an SOA initiative by vendors such as IBM, BEA Systems and Oracle.
Saying Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and JBoss were left out of the process, Fleury in his blog says SCA is a "de facto closed standard." He also notes it is being done outside the Java Community Process (JCP).
"That right there should be a warning flag as far as the adoption of this technology goes. Guys and gals, this is a declaration of war on standards and you shouldn't bank your future on closed proprietary formats," Fleury writes.
A source close to the SCA plan has said it would be submitted to an industry standards body such as OASIS for consideration as an industry standard. Sun, for its part, has indicated a willingness to work with the SCA proposal while being disappointed that it would not be submitted to the JCP.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 12, 2005 10:37 AM
December 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
BEA, Mercury collaborate on SOA
BEA Systems and Mercury Interactive are collaborating in an effort to deliver predictable business outcomes in SOA initiatives.
Products involved in a new alliance between the companies are intended to solve application performance issues and detect memory leaks for users of BEA's JRockit Java Virtual Machine and WebLogic application server. Through the arrangement, the Mercury Diagnostics Profiler will be bundled with JRockit and WebLogic Server.
Additionally, BEA's JRockit Mission Control diagnostics toolset will be distributed to Mercury Diagnostics customers. BEA also will use Mercury application management and application delivery offerings, such as Mercury's Diagnostics and LoadRunner products, as the preferred performance management solution for critical situations and proofs of concept, the company said.
BEA is offering Mercury Diagnostics Profiler with WebLogic Server 9.0 and JRockit JVM downloads at no additional cost. Mercury plans to ship BEA's Mission Control Suite diagnostic toolset as part of the Mercury Diagnostics offering in the first quarter of 2006.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 9, 2005 02:39 PM
December 05, 2005 | Comments: (0)
ESB news: Sonic, Cape Clear make moves
Looking to clear up industry confusion over what, exactly, is an enterprise service bus (ESB), Sonic Software, which pioneered this product category, on Monday released a document that the company believes settles the matter.
"By putting out a comprehensive definition of ESB, what we're bringing is kind of a new level of clarity to the definition," said Hub Vandervoort, Sonic CTO. The document defines the specific machinery - elements that make up an ESB and how that machinery is used across the lifecycle, he said.
According to Sonic, an ESB provides mediation, control and the ability to connect resources that are both Web services-based and legacy in nature. "That definition is out there but again that definition can be accomplished in a variety of ways," Vandervoort said.
Of course, Sonic attempting to define ESB for the industry does seem a bit opportunistic, given the company's bread-and-butter offering is an ESB. Sonic has sold an ESB since 2002 while others, such as BEA Systems, joined the fray later.
Also on Monday, ESB provider Cape Clear Software announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling. As a plug-in member of Eclipse, Cape Clear plans to continue to build tools to extend Eclipse, the company said. Cape Clear will work on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, which is intended to simplify development of Web-centric applications.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 5, 2005 12:09 PM
December 02, 2005 | Comments: (0)
BEA official: New SOA spec won't go to JCP
Sun Microsystems might not like it. But the newly announced Service Component Architecture specification put forth this week by a number of major vendors is not likely to make its way through the Java Community Process (JCP), for amending the Java programming language. The specification is intended to boost development of SOA.
Sun was not a party to this week's announcement because the company prefers the JCP, said Tom Goguen, Sun vice president of software marketing. "We strongly believe in the JCP process and that's how we should be driving standards really for all of the Java community as opposed to a subset of the community," Goguen said.
But Bill Roth, vice president of BEA Systems's BEA Workship Business Unit, said SCA will not be submitted to the JCP because it encompasses more than just the Java community. BEA has participated in development of SCA.
"We will not submit it to the JCP. That's not under consideration," Roth said.
For its part, Sun has expressed intentions to work with the SCA initiative.
In other matters, Roth also said BEA in the first quarter of next year plans to release its BEA Workshop 3.0 developer platform, featuring support for the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3 specification. EJB 3 focuses on building complex applications that talk to databases, Roth said.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 2, 2005 04:52 PM
November 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)
SOA specification is readied by IBM, BEA, others
Focusing on SOA, several major software vendors on Wednesday are announcing a specification called Service Component Architecture (SCA), intended to foster development of composite applications.
SCA will allow developers to focus on writing business logic in the building and packaging of applications, according to a source familiar with the announcement. Participating vendors include BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Iona, Siebel and Sybase, the source said. The specification is expected to be submitted to an industry standards body, possibly OASIS, for consideration as an industry standard.
SCA is designed for SOA, unlike platforms such as J2EE, which have been adapted to SOA. SCA is intended to allow development of application assemblies without regard to middleware or language. It features the notion of a service, which is to be defined by an interface that includes a set of operations.
With SCA, a developer, for example, could build a quote to cash application that unites a CRM system with an order management system. Service Data Object technology, for simplifying how applications handle data, is key to SCA.
SCA uses the notion of declarative policies for elements such as security, transactions and reliable messaging. Built for composite applications, it is able to describe assemblies of components that have been written in a variety of programming models and protocols.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 29, 2005 09:29 PM
November 08, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Cultural roadblocks to SOA development
When you hear about challenges companies are running up against in SOA development and deployment you probably think of technology-related stumbling blocks.
But a more human challenge was echoed by many company executives speaking here at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum in New York.
Getting buy-in from the business side of an organization is often a big hurtle to overcome, as is getting agreement between technology and business groups about expectations of an SOA.
This may be true when developing any new technology strategy, but with the sweeping nature of an SOA, the cultural challenge seems to be an overriding trend.
When asked about the biggest roadblock to their SOA deployment, Tom Myers, application architect at financial services company Evergreen Investments/Wachovia Corp. said it was getting alignment between business and IT groups.
"We had buy-in from [the] technology [side] but had to work to get the business side to understand that it wouldn't be just another siloed project. That we are trying to integrate data and free your data and make it available to everyone," Myers said.
Ed Vazquez, group manager of Web service integrations and SOA implementations at Sprint-Nextel, agreed that getting the business side of the enterprise to agree with the technology side about the SOA deployment was one of the biggest roadblocks.
The business people "don't care if it's an SOA or anything else, what they want to know is how is it going to drive new revenue, what problems it will solve, what's the ROI?" he said.
Fortunately, SOA's promise of supreme flexibility and of a framework that can change as business requirements change fits pretty well with business needs.
"They want an architecture that will change as fast as they can ask for change. That is what we were promising them and hoping to deliver to them," said Myers.
To ensure success of the project it is also critical to get specific about requirements from both the business and tech side of an enterprise, according to Vazquez.
"It's important to get both business and tech requirements, including reporting. You need to have measurement [capabilities] in place [in order] to gauge the success of your project," he said.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on November 8, 2005 02:24 PM
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