The Future of SOA

ZapForum Podcast for October 12, 2009: The Future of SOA: Does the Cloud Have a SOA Lining?

With guest experts

Jason Armstrong, Practice Manager for Strategic Solutions, Summa Techologies

Ed Horst, Chief Marketing Officer, AmberPoint

Brad Wright, Data Services Product Manger, Progress DataDirect

JP Morgenthal, Senior Principal Architect, QinetiQ

David Linthicum, Author, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide

James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research.

Panel: How to sell SOA governance to a skeptical audience

Everybody wants governance, but nobody wants to be governed.

That statement by Ron Schmelzer sums up the conundrum faced by SOA advocates: governance is desperately needed to keep SOA projects on track and in focus. What happens, though, is SOA governance gets weakened and watered down by vested interests, or lack of motivation to make SOA work.

I recently had the opportunity to moderate an ebizQ panel on the topic of SOA governance, which genarated a lot of discussion on the challenges of selling governance to a skeptical audience that may not want to be governed. The panel consisted of a stellar line-up of industry experts including Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director with Burton Group; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner with ZapThink; David Bressler, SOA evangelist for the Actional products at Progress Software; Ed Horst, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AmberPoint; Frank Martinez, senior vice president, product strategy for SOA Software; and John Michelson, a founder and chief scientist of iTKO LISA. (Archived audio replay available here.)

Read more at: ZDNet

Experts to Hash out SOA Governance Best Practices at ebizQ’s Virtual Conference

ebizQ.net (http://www.ebizq.net), the Insider’s Guide to Business and IT Agility, today announced that six of the industry’s leading experts will participate in a panel discussion on SOA Governance and IT Governance during its September 24th SOA Governance virtual conference. The expert panelists include Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group, Jason Bloomberg of Zapthink, Frank Martinez of SOA Software, Dan Foody of Progress Software, John Michelsen of iTKO and Ed Horst of Amberpoint. The panel will be moderated by leading independent SOA analyst and ZDNet contributor, Joe McKendrick.

Read more at: eBizQ

AmberPoint, Parasoft integrate SOA products

“In the SOA context,” said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg, “quality becomes more than a design-time set of activities, but actively includes runtime management. By establishing feedback loops that integrate runtime governance data into design-time test artifacts, organizations will be better able to build high-quality services in an iterative manner.”

Read more at: SD Times

Parasoft and AmberPoint Announce Joint Solution for Ensuring Reliable, Compliant SOA Applications

“Because SOA implementations involve increasingly distributed and complex systems, it becomes more challenging to create the sophisticated testing scenarios required for quality assurance across the service lifecycle,” said Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink. “These challenges threaten to extend testing lifecycles and reduce agility, but more importantly, they jeopardize system security and reliability. The integration between AmberPoint and Parasoft addresses these issues, giving organizations an automated way to generate realistic, true-to-production scenarios for exercising their services.”

Read more at: Amberpoint Press Release

Filling Holes in the SOA Stack with Runtime Governance

ZapThink considers runtime SOA governance a requirement of successful SOA, greatly increasing the chances that the SOA implementation will have business value. Indeed, the lack of adequate runtime SOA governance greatly reduces the chances of success. The ability to create and monitor policies, manage performance, secure the system, and provide self-healing mechanisms means the SOA implementation will provide ongoing value through productivity benefits.

However, most SOA stack vendors do not address many of the key requirements of SOA, including solution patterns around runtime SOA goverance. Considering this limitation, it’s important to address these issues with the proper technology, leveraged in the proper way. Thus, the purpose of this paper.

Reaching the SOA Tipping Point

The core benefits that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises–cost reduction, increased business visibility, business empowerment, and greater business agility–are becoming increasingly understood and sought after, but the fact remains that many organizations are still struggling with various challenges in the early stages of their SOA initiatives. Many such challenges are organizational and political, and as a result, many well-meaning SOA initiatives have devolved into stopgap measures and political compromises. Such projects risk failure, delays, and cancellations.

To avoid such pitfalls, it’s increasingly important for organizations to take a pragmatic approach to SOA adoption that achieves business goals under the radar, building momentum and business value iteratively. For architects who are fed up with the status quo of IT and can see the big picture of the SOA value proposition for their organizations, taking such a pragmatic approach can be the most effective way to achieve the SOA tipping point, where the organization as a whole comes to accept and value SOA as mainstream across their organizations.

If Integration Feels So Right, How Can It Be Wrong for SOA?

Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink contends most SOA integration projects aren’t actually SOA at all. He contends most companies are really buying repackaged enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions.

Read more at: IT Business Edge

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

The Next SOA Vendor to Be Acquired!

This blog asks “Who are the SOA centric companies that have not yet been acquired?” as if they are the ugly ducklings of the SOA dating game no one wants to marry.

Joe McKendrick also writes about this subject in his April 19, 2007 dated blog entry entitled “The incredible shrinking SOA vendor pool: good or bad?” referring to David Linthicum’s opinions: “Dave Linthicum, who has been involved in plenty of IT vendor acquisitions, has been keeping tabs on the churning SOA vendor space, and estimates that anywhere between three to four dozen SOA specialty vendors have been acquired in just the last couple of years. Isn’t that a good thing? For the investors in these companies, yes. But for SOA innovation, no, Dave says. In fact, we may be losing our competitive edge in SOA as a result.”

Read more at: Sys-Con