SOA Software joins Microsoft BizTalk ESB effort

Microsoft’s ability to move from partner to competitor is something pure play vendors need to be aware of when entering these partnerships, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

“It’s always a good idea to identify yourself with Microsoft, but it’s also walking a knife edge,” he said. “If your product is too much what Microsoft wants, they’ve been known to just build their own and put you out of business. You want to complement them but you don’t want to be such a strong partner that they put you out of business. I would say it’s unlikely that Microsoft wants to be in SOA Software’s business, so I would say it’s a good move for SOA Software. It worked for AmberPoint.”

Analysts at ZapThink see these partnerships as having more immediate marketing value than long-term technological significance.

“I think it’s a marketing alliance deal and not really a technology deal as much,” said David Linthicum, a consultant and analyst who joined the ZapThink practice earlier this month.

Noting that BizTalk Server has a large market share in B2B integration, Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, said, “BizTalk is probably one of the most widely adopted middleware products in the market. SOA Software wanting to take advantage of that big market, I understand. I think it’s more indicative of size of Microsoft’s space than anything specific about SOA Software.”

He said SOA Software, like the other pure play vendors, is still struggling to gain market traction in SOA governance. “I still see them struggling for market share in a market dominated by the large platform vendors,” he said.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Software AG CentraSite Community

Written by Tony Baer, Associate Analyst, ZapThink.

Governance is drawing significant attention from the boardroom down as a result of heightened regulation, increased competition, and constant change in the marketplace. There are two faces to SOA governance. On one hand, SOA governance simply means governing a SOA implementation initiative—for example, communicating corporate policies to developers implementing Services, and giving them the tools they need to follow those policies as they assemble the various elements of the SOA implementation. On the other hand, there’s a broader, more strategic definition of SOA governance: IT governance in the context of SOA.

Software AG takes a big picture view to SOA governance, based on the premise that SOA governance extends well beyond the governing of Web Services. It believes that the extensible nature of SOA requires a similarly extensible strategy to governance. Software AG has established the CentraSite Community as its strategy for providing a SOA governance solution that customers can adapt to their unique business and technology needs. Organizationally, the CentraSite Community promotes shared wisdom through its collaborative online presence. Architecturally, Software AG CentraSite registry/repository supports the community through its extensible data model and broad standards based approach. Because the CentraSite Community does not impose a one-size-fits-all governance solution, customers can implement the right governance recipe to meet their unique business needs.

WS-Federation going to Oasis after all

While the headlines imply that vendors are in hot pursuit of customers, in actuality, this is an argument of the future, rather than the present, said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer in an email response. “End users are still grappling with the basics of getting enterprise identity management to work in a composite environment. It remains to be seen what long-term uptake customers will have with WS-Federation specific products and offerings.”

Read more at: Computer Business Review

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

CA Wily tracks SOA, Web services transactions

“With SOA, management isn’t like traditional run-time management asking if the service is up or down,” says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “The nature of the environment is so dynamic operations staff needs to know if these changes to the services will or will not break the components making up the service.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

AmberPoint Takes Duo Approach To SOA Policy Governance

“The problem with many of the appliances and security solutions in the Web services and SOA space is that they require you to define the policies within their own solution, causing problems when there’s multiple systems in the enterprise,” Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said. “There’s no reason to make such a tight coupling, and so, what Amberpoint is doing is right on par with what companies are increasingly looking for in environments of heterogeneity.”

While AmberPoint may have an “early mover advantage,” other vendors are either adding, or are looking to add, similar capabilities. Those vendors include Layer 7 Technologies, Forum Systems and SOA Software; as well as policy and metadata management vendors like Software AG, Infravio, and Logic Library, Schmelzer said. Big platform vendors IBM, BEA Systems, and others are also moving in the same direction.

Read more at: CMP / TechWeb

‘Agentless’ SOA governance unveiled by AmberPoint

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink Inc., said AmberPoint is on the right track with it’s new release, but that other vendors in the SOA governance space are also recognizing the changing capabilities within the infrastructure.

“AmberPoint is one of several vendors recognizing the need for closed loop SOA governance,” the analyst said. He said this “closed loop” trend is leading vendors to recognize “that governance is more than creating policies or even enforcing policies, but also includes policy execution as well as feedback from the runtime environment back to the policy definition and management.”

The analyst said other vendors in the governance space, including SOA Software Inc., WebLayers Inc., Layer 7 Technologies Inc., Mercury Interactive Inc. (now owned by HP) and LogicLibrary Inc., can be expected to release products along similar lines in the coming months.

So while AmberPoint’s announcement is definitely on the right track,” Bloomberg said, “it’s one of a family of offerings that provide for the necessary closed-loop SOA governance.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

ZapThink: Enterprises Not Buying Service-Oriented Architecture by Name; Consulting Firms Integrate SOA Best Practices with Business-Focused Offerings

BALTIMORE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sept. 6, 2006–ZapThink released a report today showing that few enterprises are specifically budgeting for or requesting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by name. Instead, business buyers budget for specific solutions to their business problems, and more consulting firms than ever before leverage Service Orientation best practices to provide those solutions. The main buyer of such initiatives has shifted toward the non-technical, business part of the enterprise.

“The clear pattern with today’s SOA projects is that they are increasingly business-focused,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “Many consulting firms are integrating SOA best practices into a broad differentiated offering that is not necessarily specific to SOA.”

ZapThink expects the percentage of IT projects overall that leverage Service Orientation best practices to continue to grow over time, and those best practices will soon become ubiquitous. ZapThink also expects the percentage of IT projects that are named, SOA-specific projects to peak in 2007, with Service Orientation best practices increasingly subsumed within the expected, routine part of IT projects more broadly after that date.

Key findings of the report include:

• Breaking up a large SOA initiative into multiple, discrete projects is an effective way to manage the risk of architectural change.
• Integration-centric offerings and technologies are taking a back seat to organizations’ need to improve their overall approach to enterprise architecture.
• Many SOA consulting providers are confused by product vendors who often distort the true message of SOA to best fit their product offerings.
• Many SOA consulting firms confuse architecture with implementation, causing significant issues in short-term SOA adoption.
• Average deal sizes for SOA projects range from an average of $150,000 for integration-focused efforts to several million dollars for enterprisewide and compliance-focused initiatives.

The report, available on ZapThink’s Web site at www.zapthink.com, features several firms offering SOA consulting services, including Accenture (NYSE: ACN – News), AgilePath, Alphacourt, Anexinet, Arc Aspicio, Avanade, BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS – News), BearingPoint (NYSE: BE – News), Bouvet, CapGemini (Paris), CherryRoad Technologies, City Practitioners, D. Callingham & Assoc., Daugherty Business Solutions, Definition 6, e-Brilliance, eSigma, gen-i, Geniant, Hitachi Consulting (NYSE: HIT – News), HP (NYSE: HPQ – News), IBM Global Services (NYSE: IBM – News), Infosys (NASDAQ: INFY – News), innoQ, IPT, Kanbay (NASDAQ: KBAY – News), Keane (NYSE: KEA – News), Lydian Technology, MITRE, Modhelus, Momentum SI, MphasiS, MW2 Consulting, Network Effects, Online Business Systems, PricewaterhouseCoopers, ProSolveIT, Satyam (NYSE: SAY – News), Schumacher Partners, Semantic Arts, SentientPoint, SilverTrain, SOA Software, SOA Systems, Software AG (Frankfurt), SRL Group, Statera, Summa Technologies, Synergy International, Systemiclogic, TasmanAve, TeamSOA, Tier1 Innovation, Voyant Group, Wipro (NYSE: WIT – News), WM-Data (Stockholm), and XWebServices. The report also mentions the following vendors: AmberPoint, Composite Software, Fiorano, Forum Systems, Infravio, LogicLibrary, Mercury (OTC: MERQ – News), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT – News), Mindreef, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL – News), Reactivity, RedHat (NASDAQ: RHAT – News), SAP (NYSE: SAP – News), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW – News), WSO2, and WebLayers.

Read more at: ZapThink Press Release

SOA Consulting: Current Market Trends

As the practice of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) matures, professional services firms that offer SOA-related services continue to lead the market in the creation and application of best practices for SOA. For this report, ZapThink surveyed 58 consulting firms who identified themselves as offering SOA consulting services in order to assemble a detailed, global picture of the state of the market for SOA consulting worldwide. ZapThink found a substantial maturation of SOA consulting offerings across the board, with an increased focus on the business value that SOA can provide. While there still remains some confusion over the nature and applicability of SOA, methodologies, engagements, and understanding of the SOA value proposition have all dramatically improved in the last few years to the point that SOA best practices are increasingly being taken for granted as the standard approaches for solving a broad range of business problems in organizations around the world.

Infravio Embarks on European and US Event Circuit to Promote SOA Link Initiative and the Launch of X-Registry 6

Building on the debut of Infravio X-Registry(TM) Platform 6 and the SOA Link initiative, Infravio Inc., a leading provider of SOA technologies, embarked this month on a European and US event circuit to share its expertise and demonstrate its technological advances in SOA registry/repository and governance. Events include:

— ZapThink 4th SOA Practitioner’s Forum, Zurich, Switzerland, June 22, 2006 (www.zapthink.com/event.html?id=119)

– ZapThink 4th SOA Practitioner’s Forum, Frankfurt, Germany, June 23, 2006 (www.zapthink.com/event.html?id=120)

Read more at: Infravio Press Release