The Value of SOA Governance

The definition of corporate governance is creating, communicating, and enforcing policies in a corporate environment. Governance is the key to balancing executive control with employee and customer empowerment across the enterprise. While many corporate governance activities don’t directly involve the information technology (IT) department, the enterprise does call upon IT to provide tooling for automating policy creation and enforcement, when it’s possible to represent policies in a machine-understandable format.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources to meet the changing needs of the business in flexible ways. Governance is an essential part of any SOA implementation, because it ensures that the organization applies and enforces the policies that apply to the Services that the organization creates as part of its SOA initiative. But more importantly, organizations can leverage SOA best practices to represent policies broadly in such a way that the organization can achieve better policy management, flexibility, and visibility into policy compliance across the enterprise.

Web services takes flight in travel industry

Sabre “is probably one of the more aggressive, forward-looking” travel companies in terms of its Web services strategy, says Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, a Waltham, Mass.-based SOA research and advisory firm.

But building your own Web services infrastructure is not necessarily onerous, says ZapThink’s Schmelzer. Companies that have gotten immersed in Web services often discover that they’re able to draw heavily upon their existing IT infrastructures, he explains. “You don’t need a whole lot of new middleware to make SOA work,” he says.

Read more at: IT World (Canada)

SOA Repository Simplifies Business Process Development

“Large corporations that have grown by buying up multiple companies might want to reduce costs by sharing processes across the organization, but they have redundant or disparate IT systems,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink. These companies need a way to identify services, so they can implement them once rather than 20 times, Bloomberg says.

Read more at: InformationWeek

SOA Repository Locates Processes

A repository remains one key infrastructure piece companies will need to keep track of design and run times, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

“Large corporations that have grown by buying-up multiple companies might want to reduce costs by sharing processes across the organization, but they have redundant or disparate IT systems,” Bloomberg said. “Verizon has grown through numerous acquisitions over the years and they had enormous redundancies, the same system duplicated over and over again because some platforms came from GTE, Bell Atlantic and the list went on and on”

Bloomberg said companies need a way to identify services, so they implement them once rather than 20 times. And while most companies will begin by using a repository like CentraSite internally, they could theoretically put up a site and make it available to partners and affiliates.

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Process-Driven SOA

Properly implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) means more than implementing the right Services–it also means enabling businesses to use those Services to create agile Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) which meet the requirements of the business users, even as those requirements change. On the one hand, building the right Services means leveraging legacy functionality and diverse data sources to build Services that business users can compose into process-driven composite applications. Business users must then have the user tools necessary to create, manage, and use SOBAs to meet business needs. Software AG’s crossvision SOA Suite, enabled by Software AG and Fujitsu’s jointly produced CentraSite SOA registry/repository, offers enterprises the tools they need to both build and use Services as part of a properly architected SOA.

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.

2005: The year SOA broke big

In fact, ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer believes the SOA product development rate has become so intense that IT shops run high risks if they don’t get on board.

“If you’re not doing SOA, you’re in serious danger,” he said. “Every sizable software vendor has stated its future roadmap is going to be SOA related. If you don’t adopt SOA, you could be cutting yourself off and not be able to upgrade your current applications.”

“All of these companies are piling into this real weird bandwagon,” Schmelzer said. “ESB is a problematic term that was sickly in 2005 and I think it’s going to die in 2006.”

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Software AG, Fujitsu team up for SOA play

Teaming up “makes sense,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, Waltham, Mass. It puts the joint offering squarely in the competitive SOA platform landscape with the likes of IBM and BEA Systems Inc. and others, he said, and the CentraSite repository/registry goes up against offerings from LogicLibrary, Systinet Corp. and Infravio.

“Software AG is a sizeable company, but it’s still under the radar,” Schmelzer said. However, the company has “done a lot of work around data and enterprise information integration; the breadth of their product line is pretty wide.”

Fujitsu, he said, “built this business process model tooling, but found when it was doing process flow, it needed a place to store the processes as they were happening.” Schmelzer also noted that for Fujitsu, “software is a small part of what it does; it’s more of a consulting company.”

Despite flying under the radar, Schmelzer said Software AG, developer of the Tamino XML Server, has a credible SOA story. “Since 1999, they’ve been calling themselves the XML company,” he said. “They’ve actually been relevant for SOA for a long time. They had some of the first service interfaces to their products, and some of the first messaging/ESB-type functionality.”

With a customer base that uses a lot of legacy products, Schmelzer said Software AG’s “SOA story has a center of gravity closer to legacy transformation and heterogeneous data sources; their story is a lot more data focused. Some other companies with an SOA story don’t have the real information integration part of it. If you care about data, you will start to think more about Software AG.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Microsoft, Dell, Intel Submit Network Management Spec

WSDM, however, does not compete because it’s primarily used in managing applications that communicate using web services-based interfaces, Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said.

Together, the specifications could simplify management of software, computer systems and devices within a service-oriented architecture, an evolution in distributed computing based on web services standards.

“Having two languages is better than having 500,” Schmelzer said of WS-M and WSDM.

Read more at: InfortmationWeek

Update: OASIS seeks clarity on SOA

“Architecture is very difficult — in fact, architecture is mostly a challenge for people, rather than technology,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail response to an inquiry. “So, the SOA Reference Model will go a long way to helping people deal with the human aspects of making architecture work, but it will be up to companies to adopt and implement the reference model in ways that directly impact their businesses.”

“I wouldn’t read anything too significant into the lack of involvement in these by larger players, as OASIS encourages small groups of vendors to put together ideas and run them up the flagpole,” said Jason Bloomberg, also a senior analyst at ZapThink, in response to an e-mail. “It’s just a sign that these initiatives are still in the early stages.”

Read more at: InfoWorld