Resilience: The Missing Word in the SOA Conversation

In our conversations about the value of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), we frequently discuss the need for agility. The constant problem plaguing IT is its inability to deal with continuous and often unpredictable change. Therefore, it makes sense that any Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiative should focus on resolving that problem by …

SOA发展重点应放何处

但是，ZapThink公司的Ron Schmelzer失望地指出，微软对开发人员的能力和需求的深入理解使它不愿意最大限度地发挥自己的潜力应用SOA，把SOA当作一个忘却的平台或者位置。

Read more at: ChinaByte.com

SOA Summit 2009 Gives Attendees the Tools to Build a Better Business

Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, today announced its upcoming SOA Summit 2009, a premier event for SOA experts, business leaders, and application development professionals, dedicated to providing attendees real-world insights and hands-on training that can be applied immediately. SOA Summit 2009 will be held May 5-6, 2009 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The technical track features Ron Schmelzer and Jason Bloomberg, both managing partners and senior analysts at ZapThink, who will provide hands-on training modeled on ZapThink’s renowned Boot Camp sessions. The Summit concludes with highlights from National City Bank’s successful effort to grow SOA from individual project deployments to an encompassing enterprise strategy.

Read more at: Software AG Press Release

SOA联手“开放源代码”改写IT规划方程式

众多的企业和机构还在睡眼惺忪之际，业内的领头羊和冒险者早已张开了激情的臂膀来拥抱这个先机了。诱惑正在引发商机。IT行业分析公司 Gartner 认为SOA将成为创建和交付软件的主导框架，同时预测到2010年时，应用软件收入增长的80%将来自基于SOA的方案，另据美国专注于软件应用领域的咨询公司Zapthink的报告，全球SOA的市场规模将会由2005年的44亿美元猛增到2010年的430亿美元，5年的时间里将有近10倍的增长。另一方面，开源社区也越来越活跃，IBM、Oracle、AMD、BEA等都在支持和实施一些开源计划。很明显，开源不光针对商用，SOA也不光是针对系统集成，这两二因素正酝酿IT的一场技术机制与商业模式的变革。同时这也构成了新的行业“洗牌”动因。

Read more at: www.itxinwen.com

LZA Ning Group Created – Feel free to join!

I’m Inviting you to join Licensed ZapThink Architects (LZA) Credentialed Architects on Anything Enterprise Architecture Come join me on Licensed ZapThink Architects (LZA) Credentialed Architects on Anything Enterprise Architecture This group is open to anyone who has a ZapThink LZA SOA credential or is currently in process of getting one. Join in and share! 1 [...]

Leveraging Legacy Data And Web Assets For SOA Rapid Application Development

In 2009, SOA professionals will face the challenge of integrating legacy data and web assets into their SOA (ZapThink, 2008). The major factors in this trend are due to: 1)the heterogeneous nature of the systems and data and 2)increasing IT resource constraints.

Fortunately, there is a new class of tools that’s built specifically for data integration and rapid application development in a SOA context. And with these innovative tools come a necessary strategy shift in the way that SOA projects are approached and completed. “Big bang” projects will disappear, and iterative, more agile projects will be the norm.

Join the experts at ZapThink and Kapow Technologies to see how you can save precious time and budget dollars over the course of your SOA projects – making the difference between success and failure in today’s increasingly challenging environment. Also, see how Fortune 500 and fast-growth companies have made this a reality.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Tackle integration complexities of your legacy data and web assets
• Deploy your business critical apps in days and weeks vs. month and years
• Save yourself time and money with rapid application development for SOA

Read more at: TheServerSide

SOA’s final frontier: Can we, should we, service-orient batch processing?

As ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer put it in a recent note, batch processing, often thought of as an artifact left over from the legacy days, plays a vital role in systems that may have real-time processing up front. As he observed, “behind the real time systems that power the real time enterprise… are regularly-updated back office business systems. Batch processes remain essential for one key reason: it is simply not efficient to regenerate a complete forecast or business plan every time the business processes a single event such as an incoming customer order.”

Read more at: ZDNet

Fiorano’s SOA platform keeps services independent

When services pass from one service environment to another, the underlying execution environment often manages the process state, explained ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg.

“If you are relying on an execution environment to keep process state, that’s not really a service-oriented approach,” he added. “Abstracting that out makes services more independent. That can be done with traditional ESBs [Enterprise Service Bus], but it requires more work for the architect to know which resource to enable,” he said.

The Fiorano platform differs from other ESBs because it is message-driven and supports actions among services differently than traditional ESBs, Bloomberg said.

“Fiorano treats messages between services as events,” Bloomberg explained, whereas most ESBs use a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine to coordinate services, he added. That architecture creates the problem that Fiorano is attempting to solve.

Read more at: SD Times

SOA Industry Future Trends

Presentation for EDS Webinar on February 17, 2009. Covers future trends in SOA, including Software-as-a-Service, virtualization, cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0, and Enterprise Mashups.

29-slide PowerPoint in pdf format.

SOA Security Deep Dive Presentation Materials

Presentation materials from the SOA Security Deep Dive event on February 10, 2009 in Washington, DC with guest expert Toufic Boubez, SOA Craftworks and Associate Analyst, ZapThink.