How Do You Build a Service?

This is a 33 slide presentation on the things to consider when building a Service, and understanding what’s the Business side of the Service?

1. Granularity
2. Context/domain dependency
3. Ownership
4. How to identify services (process)
5. How to differentiate services

Business Processes and SOA

1. Top-down vs. Bottom-up Service development
2. Composition, Orchestration, Choreography, and Process
3. Decomposing Processes for Service definition
4. Managing Processes
5. Who is in charge of the process?
6. E2Open case study

New technology architecture enlivens e-business

Service-oriented technology is gradually resolving the e-business problems of the past, according to Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, a Massachusetts-based IT market intelligence firm. Business issues that helped sink the e-business marketplace in the 1990s–such as changing business environments, complex requirements and new international laws–are not cause for concern these days. Now new technology helps organizations provide a more agile, flexible approach to e-business that was not technologically available five years ago.

Organizations–both large and small–continue to spend millions on e-business despite the slower economy because it generates revenue, can improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity. The real goal all along for e-business–since the ’90s–has been to streamline commerce. Bloomberg says that involves streamlining the overall process of doing business by moving toward new approaches to distributed computing.

“Companies are making great strides in achieving that goal of streamlined commerce as well as agile commerce,” Bloomberg says. “Agility is more than doing things fast. It’s also responding quickly to a changing business environment. That’s something the old e-business marketplace didn’t do well at all.”

Certain industries are more B2B-oriented than others. Insurance, for example, sells “information” as its product. That industry is taking off with the use of Web services, service-oriented architecture, according to Bloomberg, because all the different companies–from insurance agents to whole insurance companies to large insurance vendors–have to conduct business with each other. Certain manufacturing supply chain industries, such as electronics, are also progressive in their use of business networks and exchanges.

“The Grand Central network handles the heterogeneity and agility requirements of the multiple participants,” Bloomberg says. “You could have one company that wants to use one approach to deal with purchase orders and another that wants to use something completely different. Grand Central acts as the middle man to translate the different requirements.”

Read more at: KM World

Web Services Management

Of all the markets that the rush to capitalize on Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) spawned, the space known as Web Services Management (WSM) is likely the most turbulent. Marked by a large number of new entrant vendors and cutthroat competition for a steadily increasing number of customers, WSM products have come to offer a core set of functionality as well as many of the key capabilities necessary for companies to build and run SOAs.

In spite of significant press and early adopter attention to the vendors in this space, there have been too many vendors chasing too few deals, and as a result, most WSM vendors have reconfigured their product and marketing strategies at least once, as they seek the right niche to build the customer traction so critical to their survival. As a result, the WSM market is filled with short-term fragmentation, as vendors jockey for position, and longer-term consolidation, as incumbent vendors make strategic acquisitions and build their WSM capabilities as the market matures.

This report provides WSM vendors with the perspective they need to focus their market and product strategies for the next one to two years, and it illustrates the complete WSM landscape for end-users, enabling them to understand which vendors will be able to provide the capabilities they require, both now and as they build out their Service-Oriented Architectures.

ZapThink: Web Services Management Market Set To Expand Dramatically; Growth Tempered by Fragmentation of Market Leading to Dominance by Incumbent Vendors

“Companies are coming to understand that Web Services Management is critical for both the operation of Web Services as well as SOAs,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “As a result, vendors in this space are finding customer traction by offering a range of different capabilities, from monitoring, to SOA enablement, to metadata management.”

Read more at: BusinessWire

Service-Oriented Architecture: Why and How?

It seems like every few years there’s some new computing approach that promises to solve all the ills facing IT in the enterprise. Hopeful IT executives invest time and money in the new approach, only to find that fundamental problems like complexity, inflexibility, and brittleness remain. Today, there is yet another promising new approach known as Service-oriented architecture. Is this new approach just another technology fad, or does it actually offer solutions to IT’s perennial problems?

As a matter of fact, today’s Service-oriented architectures based on Web services leverage the lessons learned from previous computing approaches and break new ground. Based on open standards, these new architectures expose IT functionality in a fundamentally more flexible and responsive manner. The strategic value that such architectures offer is thus in the form of IT environments and approaches flexible enough to enable companies to leverage changing business environments for competitive advantage at a reduced cost. In other words, Service-oriented architectures allow companies to do more with less.

OASIS Forms Committee to Promote BPEL

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm, said: “The submission of BPEL to OASIS is a great step for BPEL as well as Web Services in general. BPEL is a key specification aimed at providing a mechanism by which Web Services can be orchestrated into business processes, which can then be exchanged and choreographed with external processes. Business process is a critical aspect of adoption of Web Services and especially Service-Oriented Architectures since business processes are how companies define their business requirements that must then be implemented with Web Services. Without process, all you have is a jumble of Web Services. Specifications like BPEL bring order to the chaos by specifying a logical flow by which Web Services can be orchestrated to meet defined business requirements.”

Read more at: eWeek

Case Study: e2Open

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Web services finds new life as corporate bridge

“It’s not as exciting as those public Web services like Google or Amazon. In a way, it’s dull, plain-old everyday business. But it’s real business,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink.

Read more at: CNet (Asia)

OASIS Stamps Approval on ebXML CPPA

Not all analysts harbor the same optimism for ebXML, however. If ebXML’s function sounds a lot like Web services, it’s because it’s true. That is one of the reasons why ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer told internetnews.com many industry analysts are skeptical as to how readily ebXML will be adopted. While Sun and major players are backing it, Schmelzer said Microsoft and IBM prefer to support Web services standards, which are more general in nature, to the B2B-oriented ebXML protocol.

That said, Schmelzer said “a lot of us analysts think ebXML will find its way in the Web services arena” but how that might happen is unclear.

Read more at: Internetnews.com