The incredible shrinking SOA vendors

“The space is much smaller than it used to be,” observed Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. He added it’s likely to get smaller than it now. “This industry is consolidating very fast. We may find by the end of 2007 another two or three big deals.”

It’s possible that major players including Oracle Corp. and HP will be looking to fill out their SOA product lines. Schmelzer sees the management products of AmberPoint Inc. and the testing products of Mindreef Inc. as potential targets for Oracle. Those two, plus testing vendors Parasoft Corp. and iTKO Inc. might be on HP’s wishlist. As evidenced by the webMethods deal, even larger SOA vendors are not immune. “Who knows,” Schmelzer speculates, “maybe Oracle will pick up Tibco.”

Getting to the bottom line he says, “It’s looking less and less likely that strong independent companies will stay independent.”

The end of this year might also look a little like “Back to the Future” in Schmelzer’s view.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

BEA Shares Fall Amid Speculation About Company’s Future

“AquaLogic is driving key SOA wins in competitors’ accounts, because AquaLogic can seamlessly co-exist with our customers’ existing systems and because customers’ own benchmarks demonstrate that AquaLogic delivers the goods,” BEA CEO Alfred Chuang said in a statement.

But analyst Ron Schmelzer of SOA research firm ZapThink said he doesn’t see BEA emerging as an SOA leader. IBM has been the most dominant player in winning market share for its SOA middleware, and Oracle and SAP are leveraging their large base of applications customers to build their SOA presence, he said.

“BEA has not been as successful. I think we see BEA less day-to-day than we did in the Web 1.0 days,” Schmelzer said. “They made some acquisitions — Fuego and Flashline — that weren’t really SOA-oriented. Their message is somehow getting buried.”

Read more at: CRN

IBM making $1 billion bet on SOA

LogicLibrary, although still independent, announced a worldwide reseller agreement with IBM Global Services last week that will allow IBM Global Services to resell and provide services for LogicLibrary’s Logidex registry/repository and design time governance product.

In time, the company could be a natural acquisition target for Oracle, said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

IBM’s other main SOA competitors — notably BEA Systems, HP, and SAP. — are, like Oracle, software vendors with a strong presence in middleware.

HP’s SOA offerings appear more focused on a subset of SOA around management and governance, Cearley said. It’s not clear what SAP will do — adopt IBM’s approach and build its own registry/repository or, less likely, acquire one, Schmelzer said.

With IBM’s reaffirmation to SOA, Schmelzer sees echoes of the company’s wholehearted embrace of e-business in the mid-’90s, which manifested itself across every segment of Big Blue’s business.

“It’s the same level of commitment,” Schmelzer said, pointing to the more than $1 billion IBM is investing in SOA-related areas this year.

“Clearly, IBM’s expecting a multibillion dollar return on its investment,” Schmelzer added.

Read more at: InfoWorld

‘SOA 360º’ platform unveiled at BEA World

While BEA is touting its vision as unique and the SOA 360º platform as the first of its kind, Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC., said that while commendable it is part of a larger trend among SOA tool vendors.

“It’s clear that end-users are coming to expect more capabilities from the solutions they purchase,” he said. “In addition, the platform vendors are now accelerating their plans to continue the acquisition and consolidation of the market, and these two forces are resulting in SOA product “suites” that aim to solve a larger set of SOA-related infrastructure issues than previously. In addition to BEA’s efforts, Oracle, WebMethods, and Mercury (now part of HP) have all taken significant moves to bolster their SOA infrastructure platforms. Indeed, this is one of the big trends in the industry.”

The analyst said the earlier marketing hype around the enterprise service bus (ESB) is being replaced by the concept of a comprehensive platform such as SOA 360º because the industry found that ESB was only a small part of the SOA picture.

Claims of uniqueness and industry firsts aside, Schmelzer said BEA is making the right move in fleshing out its platform.

“Aqualogic presented a good vision for a cohesive platform, but there remained a lot of gaps in their offering. Some were filled with partnerships and others remain to be solved in the future,” he said. “While BEA’s work is not done in consolidating and improving the strength and competitiveness of their offerings, BEA 360 represents this latest trend in SOA infrastructure evolution.”

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BEA Unveils SOA Infrastructure Platform

Besides BEA, Oracle, WebMethods and Mercury, which is now part of Hewlett-Packard Co., have also taken steps toward bolstering their SOA infrastructure platforms, Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said.

“BEA is making the right moves with respect to fleshing out their platform, as well as their professional services capabilities,” Schmelzer said in an email. “While BEA’s work is not done in consolidating and improving the strength and competitiveness of their offerings, BEA 360 represents this latest trend in SOA evolution towards a complete ‘stack’ of product, processes, professional services, and methodologies.”

Read more at: TechWeb

So much metadata, so little time

So where does registry end and repository begin? Waters quotes ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, who sums up the challenge this way:

”Registries (like Infravio, Systinet, and Software AG) emerged when Web Services required them through UDDI and other access mechanisms,” he says. ”Repositories (like those offered by Software AG, LogicLibrary, and Flashline) were first used by developers to manage all their assets, but once those assets became services, it all started to get mushed together.”

Read more at: ZDNet Blogs

Metadata Repositories are the ”New Black”

Managing the piles of metadata generated by a service-oriented architecture has emerged as one of the knottier challenges in the brave new world of SOA. We’re talking service definitions (WSDL), policy definitions that control security and other access to services (WS-Security and WS-Policy), models and business process definitions (BPEL, UML, WS-CDL), schema for data (XML Schema), and more. The registries provide a means of discovering, locating, and binding the metadata; the repositories store it and support change and version management.

That’s how ZapThink’s SOA maven Ron Schmelzer explained it to me. ”Registries (like Infravio, Systinet, and Software AG) emerged when Web Services required them through UDDI and other access mechanisms,” he says. ”Repositories (like those offered by Software AG, LogicLibrary, and Flashline) were first used by developers to manage all their assets, but once those assets became services, it all started to get mushed together.”

Schmelzer views the acquisition as a positive move by BEA, one that fills key gaps in the company’s SOA portfolio. ”Flashline addresses part of the overall metadata management problem by tracking, governing, and managing liquid assets in a common repository,” he says. ”This is not specifically service-oriented, but rather across projects people build and deploy with BEA technology.” But gaps remain: ”[The acquisition] leaves BEA lacking with regard to service metadata management and the registry,” he says. ”[V]endors like Infravio and LogicLibrary have a more comprehensive offering for the market for SOA metadata management, registry, and governance than the Flashline offering. And Systinet, Infravio, and LogicLibrary still maintain significant market share in the industry for those capabilities… BEA will have to play catch up to add those capabilities or maintain their relationship with Systinet.” (BEA OEM’d Systinet last year.)

Read more at: Application Developer Trends

BEA buys Flashline repository for AquaLogic SOA suite

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, noted the Systinet product BEA has been using tracks service metadata, but “now Flashline addresses part of the overall metadata management problem by tracking, governing and managing liquid assets in a common repository. This is not specifically service-oriented, but rather across projects people build and deploy with BEA technology.”

While Flashline integrates with any UDDI-compliant registry, Schmelzer noted that BEA might want to upgrade from being a reseller on the registry side in the future.

“While there are positives in this announcement with BEA filling obvious gaps in their portfolio, the acquisition still leaves open gaps they will have to address in future additions to their solution line with regards to the SOA part of the metadata management picture,” he said.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

BEA buys repository maker Flashline

“The acquisition still leaves BEA lacking with regard to service metadata management and the registry,” said Ronald Schmelzer, a senior analyst at Zapthink in an e-mail message.

“Other vendors like Infravio and LogicLibrary have a more comprehensive offering for the market for SOA metadata management, registry, and governance than [Flashline].BEA will have to play catch up to add those capabilities or maintain their relationship with Systinet,” he wrote.

Read more at: InfoWorld

BEA Buys Flashline for SOA Edge

Ronald Schmelzer, a Baltimore-based analyst with ZapThink, said he believes one of the obvious reasons for BEA’s acquisition of Flashline is that ever since Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Mercury Interactive, which had acquired Systinet, “BEA was out searching for their answer to the metadata management/repository side of the SOA picture.”

The acquisition fills a gap because BEA had previously partnered with Systinet for its technology. Flashline addresses part of the overall metadata management problem by tracking, governing and managing liquid assets in a common repository, Schmelzer said.

However, the acquisition still leaves BEA lacking with regard to service metadata management and the registry, Schmelzer added.

“First off, other vendors like Infravio and LogicLibrary have a more comprehensive offering for the market for SOA metadata management, registry and governance than the Flashline offering, and, furthermore, Systinet, Infravio and LogicLibrary still maintain significant market share in the industry for those capabilities,” he said. “As such, BEA will have to play catch-up to add those capabilities or maintain their relationship with Systinet.”

Read more at: eWeek