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

BEA Says It Leads in Service-Oriented Architecture

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC of Waltham, Mass., took exception with that position. “BEA’s SOA vision is very platform-centric,” Bloomberg said. “By this, we mean that you can build an SOA with WebLogic, but WebLogic must be the crux or centerpiece of the SOA.

“Contrast this view with the purer ESB [Enterprise Service Bus] views of companies like Sonic [Software Corp.] or Fiorano [Software Inc.], and it’s not at all clear that BEA’s approach is necessarily the best on the market for building SOAs.”

Read more at: eWeek

Building SOAs the Compuware Way

According to ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg, such Web services capabilities alone are not enough to enable corporate enterprises to build SOAs.

“However, combined with Uniface’s existing model-driven approach that enables the reuse of components across the enterprise, Uniface will compete favorably with tools such as those offered by IBM/Rational, Borland, BEA Systems, Sybase, Systinet, Rogue Wave, and others,” he said.

“SOAs, however, are architectures, which means they consist of best practices and software design principles,” Bloomberg added. “Development tools like Uniface can help a company build an SOA, but there’s no replacement for the expertise of an architect.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Borland advances ALM goals

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, questioned whether platform independence is a boon to developers in the grand scheme of ALM.

“To have a separate development platform and a separate portal platform … is becoming less and less attractive to developers,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Devs Should Brace for Wave of Process, Modeling Tools

IDN has, and will, go in-depth on many of these new tools, what developers say about them and how (if at all) they are changing their day-to-day jobs. But, to get the big picture, however, this week we turn to a recent report from ZapThink, a web services research firm in Waltham, Mass.

ZapThink researchers say these latest announcements from big vendors is just the beginning of a new emphasis on process-driven tools for integration — and even all-out migration. In addition, the recent report says developers should brace themselves for a new wave of web services tools and IDE plug-ins that support process-driven services for Java and .NET.

Developers will soon see a new wave of web services tools and IDE extensions to support process-driven services, according to ZapThink’s latest report, “Service-Oriented Process.”

Read more at: Integration Developer News

SOA Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra

ZapNote: Rational Software

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SOA Tools and Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

SOA Tools

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra