IBM fills out SOA product line

“Predominant among these announcements is their enhanced capabilities on the business process side, as well as new capabilities for connecting business partners and enhanced modeling,” said Ronald Schmelzer, a senior analyst with ZapThink, in an email responding to questions.

Still, IBM maintained for a long time that an ESB was merely a design concept rather than a specific product. Customers are apparently confused by the SOA idea and now want all vendors to provide an ESB, regardless of whether they really need one, he said.

“In IBM’s case, they repackaged their enterprise messaging capabilities together with some business process capabilities and standards-based interfaces and made it lightweight to craft their entry-level ESB,” Schmelzer said.

While it’s good that vendors are listening to customers, so many different takes on the ESB concept have made the term virtually meaningless, he said.

“At the end of the day, companies looking to implement an SOA should ask themselves what infrastructure they are missing to create loosely-coupled, composable, standards-based services, what they already have that simply needs to be repurposed, and what they need to buy to expand their capabilities around metadata,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

IBM to offer ESB as part of SOA strategy

ESB activity by the rest of the industry forced IBM’s hand, according to Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

“It looks like the market and customers have compelled IBM to release its own ESB-branded product as a way of offsetting the increasing noise and competition in the space for those sorts of products,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Microsoft pitches ESB alternative

“Fundamentally, what Microsoft is putting together is much better than an ESB,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail response to questions. “Basically, WCF is a quantum leap above ESB — it’s essentially a framework for building a whole range of different tools, including ESBs. So yes, the combination of WCF and BizTalk does much of what today’s ESBs do, but that undersells the power of Microsoft’s vision and technology, especially as they move to the Vista wave.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

Cape Clear Adds More Messaging Punch to ESB

ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg says Cape Clear’s additional messaging support, especially for JBoss JMS, moves its product closer to an actual ESB.

“Before this addition, we questioned whether it made sense for Cape Clear to call their product an ESB, as they only relied upon existing messaging transports as opposed to providing one of their own, Bloomberg says. “Now, however, they clearly offer an ESB. SOA implementations should enable companies to compose services into loosely coupled processes, so Cape Clear’s ESB goes a long way to providing the infrastructure companies need to be successful with their SOA initiatives.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

Iona Embraces Mainframes, Eclipse in New ESB

Noting that Artix has always been a high-performance tool, ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said Iona’s mainframe integration sets it apart from many of the other ESB vendors, and puts it into competition with Seagull Software, NetManage, HostBridge and others.

“The challenge IONA faces, however, is in differentiating the rest of its ESB message from other vendors like Sonic Software,” Bloomberg said.

“Extensibility is not really a strong differentiator, as competitors’ products are also quite extensible. We’d like to see them emphasize their performance more, as that’s always been their strong suit.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Microsoft, Sun Submit Web Services Drafts to W3C

While Cape Clear has done a “remarkable” job upgrading the standards support for Cape Clear 6, ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg questioned the company’s decision to describe its technology as an ESB.

“Unlike offerings from ESB vendors like Sonic Software, Cape Clear’s ESB doesn’t come with a messaging infrastructure, instead relying upon a customer’s existing infrastructure,” Bloomberg told internetnews.com. “Therefore, Cape Clear 6 is really more similar to Blue Titan’s fabric approach than to other ESBs on the market. But unlike Blue Titan, Cape Clear doesn’t offer enterprise-level scalability out of the box, either.”

“Instead, Cape Clear 6 can be installed in a J2EE application server, which would then provide scalability, preventing Cape Clear 6 from being a true stand-alone ESB,” he continued.

Read more at: InternetNews

Service at Your Discretion

The market for SOA products and services will reach a total value of $4.5bn by 2005, and $43bn by 2010, according to ZapThink, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based analyst company that specialises in tracking web services and SOA.

Read more at: Computer Business Review

CA Extends Web Services Management Leadership With New Software and Hosted Service

“Companies today have limited visibility into the runtime performance of their increasingly critical Web services,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “CA’s Web Services Performance Index will enable these companies to better monitor and enforce service level agreements with their business partners — thereby ensuring performance and uptime accountability.”

Read more at: Computer Associates Press Release

Services-oriented architecture gains support

The growing interest in the revitalized SOA enabled by Web services has created a rush of interest from technology providers eager to cast themselves as “SOA providers.” In reality, the latest products–essentially the latest generation of middleware and development tools–are still relatively immature. But marketing from large vendors is beginning to raise awareness, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at research company ZapThink.

“There’s still a lot more make-up than substance (from vendors), but that doesn’t matter,” said Schmelzer, who reported seeing an uptick in interest in SOAs from potential customers. “(Corporate) developers are saying, ‘Loosely coupled systems and standards-based computing–I like that idea…So it’s got a lot of people thinking about it.’”

For all the promise, though, creating shared software services in a company is a significant shift. To promote reusable services across a business, companies need to shed the ingrained notion that one person or department “owns” a specific application or data source, cautioned Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink. On top of cultural changes, technical architects and designers need to carefully consider how to structure their business as a set of discrete services, experts said.

“Usually the first SOA project brings a reasonable improvement in integration, but subsequent projects will realize a better return on investment as companies reuse services,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: CNet

BEA, Cape Clear support SOAs

“BEA and Cape Clear … hope to reduce the cost and complexity of moving to SOAs,” said Jason Bloomberg, analyst at ZapThink. “However, these tools won’t eliminate the complexity entirely, but rather provide some guidance as companies adopt SOAs.”

Read more at: InfoWorld