Progress Software Names New CEO

Overall, Progress “has quite a few good assets in the SOA and integration markets,” said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer via e-mail. “However, they are in many ways a second-tier vendor competing against the much more entrenched incumbents: IBM, Oracle, Software AG, HP and Microsoft.”

Market consolidation, such as Oracle’s purchase of BEA, has further cemented the position of the incumbents, Schmelzer added.

But this in turn “makes Progress continue to be a good second choice when end-users aren’t first considering their existing incumbent vendors,” he said. “Without Progress itself getting acquired by one of the ‘big guys,’ I don’t see how this dynamic will change.”

Read more at: PC World

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

Oracle to put Fusion middleware in Amazon Compute Cloud

The tools are now “tightly integrated” with the re-branded Oracle WebLogic server. In a recent interview Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink, said WebLogic was the crown jewel in the BEA acquisition and filled a gaping hole in Fusion.

“If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice,’ what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: SearchSOA

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.

Oracle re-brands BEA WebLogic as its strategic server for SOA

The rapid re-branding of WebLogic indicates that it was one of the crown jewels Oracle was seeking in acquiring BEA, since the Oracle server was not a market leader, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

Analyzing today’s announcement, Bloomberg said, “If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice,’ what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

Oracle Lays out BEA Product Strategy

While Kurian argued that Oracle has already made great strides in the roughly six weeks since the deal closed, numerous challenges still lie ahead for the company due to product overlap, according to Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with the SOA consultancy ZapThink.

“On the plus side, however, Oracle has a good track record in supporting the customers of acquired companies,” he said in an e-mail message. “They know the BEA acquisition was mostly about customer acquisition, so they’re likely to bend over backwards to keep BEA’s customers around. But on the technology side, the integration will keep their hands full.”

Read more at: PC World

Make Everyone a Winner

Oracle has been having trouble delivering on its Fusion middleware vision, which ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg once called a “Frankenstein” approach to SOA, assembling various parts from different places. The question, he posed, is will it all work when it’s done? But Zotto also noted that BEA’s AquaLogic has been only slightly more successful, garnering about 10 percent of the market versus Oracle’s 8.5 percent. Part of the reason is that they’re based on application servers, which were created before Web services were on anyone’s lips. And then there’s the threat from open-source.

Read more at: SD Times

SCA and SDO standards

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a specification that describes a model for building applications and systems using the core notions of SOA. SCA encourages an organization of business application code based upon components that implement business logic, which offer their capabilities through service-oriented interfaces and which consume functions offered by other components through service-oriented interfaces, called service references.

When building SCA components, you need to move through two major steps. First, the implementation of service components provides services, as well as consumes other services. Second, the assembly of sets of components to build business applications, through the wiring of service references to services.

Read more at: SearchSOA

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Energy & Utilities Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 24, 2008 features:

James Jones, Director, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), BP

Rusty Foreman, DCT Enterprise Architecture, BP

Patrick Bhirdo, Endigo Energy

Richard Green, Principal Analyst, DTE Energy

David Anderson, Solution Architect, BEA Systems, Inc

John Michelsen, Founder & Chief Architect, iTKO

Dan Finerty, Director, Product Marketing, DataDirect Shadow

Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA: Energy and Utilities event in Houston, TX on February 5, 2008.

The SOA implications of Oracle’s BEA purchase

While not doubting Oracle’s interest in WebLogic, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., said the fate of BEA’s AquaLogic SOA product line is not so clear.

“We see this deal more about WebLogic than AquaLogic — that is, more about BEA’s J2EE offering and customers than their SOA story,” Bloomberg said. “As the Oracle Fusion story shapes up, it has become a stronger SOA story than AquaLogic ever was, so the addition of BEA will provide only marginal benefit there. But in the J2EE space, Oracle has lagged behind BEA for years, so the combined company will be better able to take on IBM in that part of the market.”

“Ellison’s quote is disingenuous on its face, because it would be expected that Oracle’s products are more valuable to Oracle’s customers than competitors’ products, or those organizations wouldn’t be Oracle’s customers in the first place,” the ZapThink analyst said. “But that doesn’t mean that IBM’s products aren’t more valuable to IBM’s customers or similarly with any other vendor’s products.”

Read more at: SearchSOA