Progress puts its Mindreef assets to work on SOA

“Combining quality and management capabilities makes a lot of sense. Governance quality and management all fit closely together,” said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg. “For the Actional tool to be competitive with the likes of [Hewlett-Packard], it makes sense to include quality.”

He noted that Progress Software is a long-term partner of HP and that Actional often works in conjunction with the Systinet registry/repository.

Read more at: SD Times

Overcoming SOA Insecurity

SOA allows IT organizations to externalize identity management outside of the application, said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. That eases the problem, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, he noted. “You have to specify details for each user or service,” he said, offering an example of an online merchant. “You can see this [inventory] data, but you can’t get at the credit card authorization service.”

A key thing to check for is how the SOA is using third-party components, and whether those components are functioning properly, said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Take down one key service, [and] you can take down [the entire app],” he noted. “Can you imagine what would happen if Google Maps went down? How many applications would I kill?” In the past, that would have been a problem for only Google, he noted, but with SOA, the impact is so much wider. “The greatest benefit of SOA–[the ability to share services]–is also the greatest problem of SOA.”

Read more at: SD Times

Overcoming SOA Insecurity

SOA allows IT organizations to externalize identity management outside of the application, said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. That eases the problem, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, he noted. “You have to specify details for each user or service,” he said, offering an example of an online merchant. “You can see this [inventory] data, but you can’t get at the credit card authorization service.”

Agree on core standards with business partners. A travel Web site sells airline tickets. Its partner sites rent cars. But how does a company manage user identities in a way that it is meaningful to its partners? asked Schmelzer. “This is known as ‘identity propagation,’ where all participants know who the end user is.” Standards such as WS-Federation and Liberty Alliance help manage this problem, he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean everyone has implemented them,” so it’s imperative for all parties to meet face-to-face and agree on which standard to implement.

A key thing to check for is how the SOA is using third-party components, and whether those components are functioning properly, said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Take down one key service, [and] you can take down [the entire app],” he noted. “Can you imagine what would happen if Google Maps went down? How many applications would I kill?” In the past, that would have been a problem for only Google, he noted, but with SOA, the impact is so much wider. “The greatest benefit of SOA–[the ability to share services]–is also the greatest problem of SOA.”

Read more at: SD Times

Dave Linthicum Interviews SOA Visionaries

I’m happy to tell you about the first ever SOA Visionaries Podcast. This is an exciting new ebizQ podcast series, featuring a veritable “who’s who” in the world of SOA and Web services management. We’re talking to people who are making an impact, not only with their products and technology but also with their unique vision into the market. This series seeks to help people grow and add insight to their Web services infrastructure and SOA.

In this installment, the incomparable Dave Linthicum speaks to Juliana Camorano of Progess Actional.

Read more at: eBizQ

SOA Visionaries with Juliana Camorano

Hi, this is Dave Linthicum, with ebizQ.net and this is the Service Oriented Architecture Visionary podcast and this is basically a series in talking to who’s who in the world of service oriented architecture and web services management and people who are making an impact, not only with their products and technology but with their vision into the market and basically helping people grow their web services infrastructure and service oriented infrastructure going forward. My name is Dave Linthicum, I’m the CEO of the Linthicum Group LLC, a consulting organization dealing with the best of the best in service oriented architecture best practices, implementation and technology. And, I’m here today, with our guest Juliana Camorano who is the Senior Project Marketing Manager for Progress Software, Actional product line.

Read more at: eBizQ

The incredible shrinking SOA vendors

“The space is much smaller than it used to be,” observed Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. He added it’s likely to get smaller than it now. “This industry is consolidating very fast. We may find by the end of 2007 another two or three big deals.”

It’s possible that major players including Oracle Corp. and HP will be looking to fill out their SOA product lines. Schmelzer sees the management products of AmberPoint Inc. and the testing products of Mindreef Inc. as potential targets for Oracle. Those two, plus testing vendors Parasoft Corp. and iTKO Inc. might be on HP’s wishlist. As evidenced by the webMethods deal, even larger SOA vendors are not immune. “Who knows,” Schmelzer speculates, “maybe Oracle will pick up Tibco.”

Getting to the bottom line he says, “It’s looking less and less likely that strong independent companies will stay independent.”

The end of this year might also look a little like “Back to the Future” in Schmelzer’s view.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

New Orbits For Mercury’s SOA?

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg, who followed Systinet closely when the company was a standalone competing with the likes of SOA Software, Actional and others, applauded Mercury’s integration of the governance software maker.

“Mercury now has a deep, comprehensive toolset for the entire service lifecycle, from design time through deployment to runtime management and dynamic service change and reconfiguration,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: InternetNews

Rogue services lurk in SOA

Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC., and another voice warning against rogue services, describes the worst case scenario this way: “Think of a laptop with personal customer information left in a taxi, only now it’s left in a Web service accessible from the Internet. Just as serious.”

This governance view is shared by ZapThink’s Bloomberg, although he finds that not only are rogue services a “very real problem,” but also a present danger.

“We’re seeing them all over the place,” he said, sharing the concerns of Foody. But reflecting Erickson’s view, the analyst argues that it is first of all a management and governance issue.

“These services often don’t have the appropriate management infrastructure in place to ensure their reliability and availability, impacting their loose coupling, and they are also ungoverned, which means they can potentially violate corporate policies of various sorts,” Bloomberg said.

But a second part of the problem in the analyst’s view is the proliferation of Web services by organizations that believe that they are doing SOA when they may only be creating IT chaos.

“Some companies think that all they have to do is build enough services and they’ll grow themselves an architecture, which is the furthest thing from the truth,” Bloomberg said. In his view this ungoverned production of Web services not only creates potential rogue services, but because they are unknowns, they often provide redundant capabilities that defeats the purpose of reuse in SOA.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Making Sense of SOA Governance, Service Lifecycle Management, Registries & Repositories

The Service-oriented architecture (SOA) marketplace is experiencing substantial flux, as enterprises hammer out their SOA initiatives, and vendors position their offerings to meet their customers’ needs. One particularly dynamic corner of this broader market is the SOA governance segment. The vendors in the SOA governance space actually position themselves into one or more of the following market niches: registry/repository products, policy management tools, Service lifecycle management platforms, or SOA governance tools. Even though these segments are in flux, they all share a core capability: the ability to manage the metadata that form the lifeblood of every SOA implementation.

SOA management players partner up

“The market is maturing pretty significantly and vendors are trying to capitalize on this by bringing together a complete solution,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “SOA is architecture. You need a lot of different things. Going to 12 different vendors to get those things is increasingly looking tenuous. The market is pushing toward consolidation and deeper partnerships.”

While Actional’s play is now as part of a larger company, competitor SOA Software has been bulking up, most recently with a mainframe Web services product acquired from Merrill Lynch. “SOA Software is building a suite,” Schmelzer said. “They’ve moving well beyond management.” And making itself “registry independent” even though the company has its own registry product is smart, he said, “because the market hasn’t decided its buying behavior yet.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices