CMP’s Intelligent Enterprise Announces 2008 Editors’ Choice Winners, Showing Exceptional Vision, Innovation and Leadership

CMP’s Intelligent
Enterprise (http://www.intelligententerprise.com) today announced the results of
its 2008 Editors’ Choice Awards. The editors chose 48 companies that
provide exceptional vision, technology innovation and customer leadership
in attaining strategic objectives.

Award selection collaborators included:David Linthicum, Zapthink

Read more at: CMP

Where Have All the SOA Standards Gone?

To mark a new standard in the SOA space, I create a Google Alert and sift through the pile of links returned to get the scope of its maturation. I’m currently tracking over 60 standards, starting with SOAP and XML (XML happened way before Google was cool).

Lately I’ve noticed a drop in the number of blogs, links, and articles talking about particular SOA standards. Where I once got dozens of links a week on some standards, I now get only one or two or none. So, I’m thinking that standards, although around, aren’t as cool as they once were, and maybe people are a bit confused by the alphabet soup out there.
Standards have changed. At first they were good thoughts about a single way to do something, so everyone could mix and match solution patterns. They are now more marketing hype than anything else. In essence, if you’re building a SOA product, make sure to start with a WS-something, and you can prove that you’re a standard, and standards are always desirable. Right?

Read more at: SOA World

Is Google in the Right Gear?

Meanwhile, Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, has doubts about Google’s ability to make much of a mark with Gears.

“Google Gears is hardly game-changing,” Bloomberg said. “It’s far from being the ‘threat to desktop software’ or any kind of bona fide challenge to Microsoft. Instead, it enables developers to add the offline capability that’s a core part of many rich Internet application solutions today. In other words, the commercial/enterprise software world has had offline capability for a while now, and Google is taking a step to bringing a lightweight, open-source toolkit to the masses that will enable a broader range of developers to add this capability to their Web apps.”

Read more at: eWeek

A Market for Managed Mashups Emerges

ZapThink senior analyst and principal Jason Bloomberg explained that this effort was a natural extension of Microsoft’s work in the telecommunications space: “It’s the idea of bringing composite applications to the telco industry, and leveraging .NET…. They want you to use Microsoft everywhere you can.” He observed that “telcos are particularly interested in convergence stories” involving long-deployed technologies such as landline and SMS, as well as newer ones such as Web services. “The sweet spot…for telcos is mashups that leverage these different channels.”

But Bloomberg argued that the managed aspect of these services can be limiting. “What isn’t as mashup-like about this is…the user can’t change his capabilities. I can’t recompose it; I can’t take out this Microsoft map, and drop in Google Maps instead. User empowerment is a key part of the definition of a mashup, but the world isn’t necessarily ready for that in the enterprise, at least until the tools mature further.”

Read more at: SD Times

Enterprise Mashups Get Caught in the Web 2.0

“There are two different worlds talking about these things that are now colliding violently,” explained ZapThink senior analyst and principal Jason Bloomberg. “On the one hand, you have the whole Web 2.0 thing, which is consumer-oriented, it’s collaborative, it’s Web-based…. There are a few business models out there, but they’re mostly graphical and they mostly take advantage of mapping capabilities. The other world is the world of SOA,” he continued, where IT groups are “looking to build loosely coupled services that abstract various sorts of IT capabilities across the organization, with the purpose of composing these into a service-oriented business application [SOBA]. What’s happening in the SOBA world is that we’re shifting to a greater focus on the service consumer, which is now [a] piece of software.”

But for it to be useful in the enterprise, it requires more than just APIs and XML, Bloomberg contends. “The overlap between the Web 2.0 world and the enterprise world is what we call the ‘enterprise mashup.’ What makes them ‘enterprise’ is that the services are loosely coupled; that is, they’re managed, they’re secure, there’s governance in place to deal with…the policies that apply to how organizations use services,” he said.

“Governance is really the key,” Bloomberg continued, “because no enterprise is just going to allow anyone to put any service they want together, however they like, the way you would with Google Maps. In the enterprise, services have sensitive information, and sensitive capabilities. You can’t just take the free-for-all… aspect of Web 2.0 and import it into the enterprise, without thinking through the whole governance question.”

Read more at: SD Times

The top SOA/Web services stories of 2006, part 1

Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, sees WS-Policy as a good first step, but warns that it only establishes a container for sharing policies, not the vocabulary for declaring the policies themselves.

“It’s necessary, but not sufficient,” he said. “It’s not enough to solve the problems of policy interoperability by itself.”

Both he and Schmelzer believe agile has emerged as a best practice for development.

Schmelzer viewed much of the changes as attempts to fit the enterprise service bus into a sensible SOA infrastructure. In particular he’s down on the notion of the ESB as the central cog in an SOA software stack.

“I think the idea of the SOA mega-suite is too un-SOA in philosophy,” he said.

Both he and Schmelzer agreed that Eclipse has become the main integrated development environment for those not inside the Microsoft cloud. Schmelzer praised it for reinforcing the SOA concept of modularity during design time.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Big Companies Embracing Software Mashups

Experts say that although enterprise mashups promise to help make software development easier, they also present a new set of challenges. One of the key characteristics of enterprise mashups is that they put more power in the hands of end users. “The average I.T. establishment is reluctant to give users more power,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consulting firm ZapThink. The answer, he says, is for the I.T. department to provide oversight, defining what kinds of mashups are allowed, and then to govern that process. Software and service vendors can help companies implement management tools.

Read more at: CIO Today

Mashups to Re-Map the Legal Tech Market?

“Consumers have been out there doing funky things with their browsers, and we’re calling those things mashups,” says ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg. “What’s interesting to us about this phenomenon is how mashup capabilities are being used in businesses to leverage services in the context of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We’re calling those apps enterprise mashups.”

ZapThink views the emergence of Web 2.0 as a natural evolution of the SOA, in which loosely coupled software services provide the business processes. Mashups that meet business needs will require SOA, Bloomberg explains, and the SOA infrastructure is necessary to guarantee the loose coupling. “Without that loose coupling, mashups are little more than toys from an enterprise perspective,” he says.

An SOA provides another critical enterprise component: governance. “Mashups today — what you might call public mashups — are inherently ungoverned,” Bloomberg says. “How many businesses are going to risk allowing their employees to assemble and reassemble business processes with no controls in place to ensure that the resulting apps follow corporate policies? Companies have to worry about privacy rules, Sarbanes Oxley, confidentiality — all these policies that a business user has to follow. There’s no way a company is going to let mashups into the organization unless it can make sure that people are following those kinds of rules.”

Read more at: Law.com Legal Technology

Amazon Takes Aim at Hosted Storage

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, agrees, predicting that other big-name enterprises could follow Amazon’s lead, opening up their own back-end storage systems. “It’s possible that Google could get into this market, for sure, even Yahoo, MSN, or some of the telecom providers,” he says.

Read more at: Byte and Switch

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