Cisco buys Reactivity for $135 million to bolster SOA offerings

While Cisco’s XML-based AON technology has not gained a lot of traction with customers, observers say the SOA networking market is still potentially lucrative. ZapThink, a research firm focused on enterprise SOA, predicts the market for XML optimization technology will reach $1.2 billion by the end of the decade. The company also predicts that Web services traffic will make up around 48% of all enterprise traffic by next year.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Oracle OpenWorld 2006: The Tech Conference that Ate San Francisco

”This movement toward application modernization has a lot of legs,” says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst and founder of ZapThink. ”A lot of companies are still using client-server applications and mainframe applications that never made the transition to the Web. Some of these applications command a high cost of ownership, because they lack flexibility and they use proprietary technologies. Now is the right time [to transition those apps], and SOA is the right strategy.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

Open Message Queuing on Horizon

However, Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, of Waltham, Mass., questions whether another specification is necessary. “A key question is whether dealing with such interoperability challenges is best handled at the messaging infrastructure level or at the service interface,” Bloomberg said. “Is this just one more JMS [Java Message Service], which now has several vendor-specific implementations?”

Bloomberg argues that with a protocol specification, somebody still has to go through the effort of building a system. But JPMorgan and other group members maintain that this option is still bound to be less expensive than proprietary solutions and that savvy users can build their own implementations, while others can rely on help from companies such as C24 to provide support and services.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg called AMQP a new specification for defining and developing messaging infrastructure that is intended to be technology-agnostic, open and interoperable. AMQP has implementations on C and C++ and will support C# and Java, sources said.

Read more at: eWeek

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.

The governance gap in SOA

“The two salient characteristics of WebLayers Center are its enterprise scalability and its broad-based governance,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC. “WebLayers Center isn’t just an SOA governance tool, but rather leverages SOA for governance in distributed enterprise environments that may not have made the move to SOA. We feel that this is the future of SOA governance and WebLayers is there now.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

The future revealed: What the year ahead holds for customers

Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, predicts 2006 will see the discontinuation of early pilots and the emergence of next-generation SOA projects that include the proper use of a registry or repository, effective life-cycle management of services and a comprehensive IT governance framework – things that were missing from many initial SOA projects.

“By clearing away some of the poor implementations of the past, architects can build SOA implementations that better meet the needs of their organizations moving forward,” Bloomberg says.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

XML at Interop 2005: Is XML Still Relevant?

I was curious to see how the players in networking were being influenced by Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), both hot topics in the XML world. A recent research report from ZapThink (http://www.zapthink.com) predicted a growth in XML traffic on corporate networks from 15% in 2004 to just under 48% by 2008. With these numbers in mind, I decided to brave the windy canyons of the Big Apple and see for myself how XML and network managers were getting along.

Read more at: InformIT

IBM acquires DataPower

“DataPower’s product suite of integration, security and performance appliances will fill various holes within IBM’s broad SOA offering,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at research firm ZapThink. IBM is acquiring the sales leader in the application-oriented networking market — and a company that already has a solid relationship with IBM’s software, hardware and services groups, he says.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Can an SOA network push aside middleware?

“There’s a great big picture battle going on here about where the intelligence in a service-oriented architecture should lie,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst for ZapThink LLC. “On one hand you have the message-centric middleware model, on the other is the intelligent network approach.”

Bloomberg explained that, as XML devices, chip sets and network agents mature, they could take over the space traditionally occupied by integration software, eliminating the middleman, if you will.

“If we do service-oriented architecture right, the integration becomes the byproduct of the architecture,” he said. “Then you’ll be able to make security decisions, apply policies and have all your services intermediaries in the network itself.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices