Leveraging an On-Demand Platform for Enterprise Architecture

typically don’t plug my Webinars here, but there is a very interesting one I’m doing on Thursday (tomorrow)…Leveraging an On-Demand Platform for Enterprise Architecture. This is an essence the talk I gave at Dream Force last week in San Francisco. I’ve gotten some good feedback from that one.

What’s cool about this the paradigm shift. While I’ve been an advocate for integration on-demand (e.g., my past gigs at Grand Central and BRIDGEWERX), applications on-demand, the notion of a platform on-demand has only recently come to life with the stuff that Salesforce.com has been working on. So, tune into this one. It’s going to be more education than a “sell job.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

SOA Planning and Design…It’s Still the Wild West

SOA planning and design has received almost no press when you consider the amount that�s out there about the technology. I�ve taken a run at a planning methodology with my �12 Steps to SOA,� written 4 years ago now, and there are others out there as well including approaches from Zap Think, and even vendors such as Polarlake. However, typically these types of publications take a back-seat to the ESB vs. Fabric debate, or even who invented a buzzword. Not productive.

Read more at: InfoWorld Blogs

Grand Central Communications: Integration on Demand

The Grand Central Business Services Network offers an implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that follows the “on demand” model of delivering software functionality as a Service. Through a virtualized set of integration and Service capabilities, businesses connect to the Business Services Network, allowing them to combine and share business Services within and between organizations without the constraints of having to pay for and host their own integration infrastructure.

In addition to a wide range of Services that Grand Central provides, third-party companies and partners also publish Services to the Network for global access and sharing by partners, customers and other business units. The Business Services Network thus offers the capabilities, business value, and agility benefits of Service-oriented integration as a Service to multiple companies, allowing them to conduct business with each other in a flexible, cost-effective manner, without having the bear the burden of ongoing infrastructure investment.

Grand Central: Integration is a Service

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said Grand Central might be on to something, because the concern is providing a virtualized environment for running and hosting services, which could give companies a way to implement service-oriented architectures (SOA).

“Will the GC approach replace all integration technologies and efforts in a company? Probably not, since there are still quite a few integration scenarios that are either tightly coupled or happen entirely within a secured, local environment, where reaching out to a third party might not make sense,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com.

“However, for the majority of integration scenarios that are business-to-business, or even department-to-department, where the primary challenge is simply making the connection happen in a loosely coupled fashion, the [Grand Central] approach might be very attractive.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Grand Central Communications Unveils New Developer Program

ontest entries will be judged by a panel of Web services and SOA experts including Tim O’Reilly, founder and chief executive officer of O’Reilly Media; Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer, senior analysts with industry research firm ZapThink; Bill Appleton, founder, president and chief scientist of DreamFactory; Phil Windley, contributing editor for InfoWorld Test Center; Tony Hong, co-founder of XMethods; Phil Wainewright, chief executive officer, Procullux Ventures, and publisher of Loosely Coupled; and Halsey Minor, chief executive officer, chairman and founder of Grand Central Communications.

Read more at: Grand Central Press Release

How to Explain SOA to Your CIO

n explaining all this to your CIO, you’ll want to be careful about distinguishing between Web services and service-oriented architectures (see “SOA: Debunking 3 Common Myths”), according to Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink, an analyst firm that specializes in XML, Web services, and SOAs. “They’re different things and have different implementation patterns and different rates of return. Web services are more tactical, solving integration issues; SOAs are more strategic and provide greater business utility.” Web services are some of the parts, in other words; SOAs are the connections between them.

Industries moving first to SOAs are those that typically lead in IT–the financial services sector, for example, which tends to spend heavily on IT. The insurance industry, according to Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, is also leading the charge. That’s because huge insurance companies are often running expensive legacy systems. That makes them eager to adopt a cost-effective way to get at the business processes, data, and other valuable assets locked up in those systems. Legacy is thus “a sweet spot for this technology,” according to Schmelzer. As those companies try to reuse existing investments to save money, he said, SOAs and Web services offer an obvious solution.

“There’s a lot of good short-term ROI” on SOA efforts that integrate existing mainframe applications, portal structures, application servers, deployed business logic, and directory systems, Schmelzer said. And those projects can yield a fairly quick return–”in some cases, a few months.”

According to ZapThink, vendors’ offerings fall into two rough categories of choices, and you might want to weigh your approach based on that. First is the application-centric approach, which ZapThink says works best in less heterogeneous environments with a smaller set of technologies. IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle all offer products that fall in this category.

The other approach is based around message queuing and asynchronous messaging, or what’s referred to as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It uses a more message-oriented approach to connecting systems, Schmelzer said, and thus can be cost-effective. Smaller players such as Sonic Software are competing here, although Microsoft’s, BEA’s, and IBM’s products also fall into this space.

It comes down to using SOAs appropriately. “They’re especially good when you have changing business requirements,” said ZapThink’s Bloomberg. “But they’re not good when you have very high performance requirements–I wouldn’t want my anti-lock braking system to be a service-oriented architecture. I want it to be tightly coupled and to respond in milliseconds.”

Read more at: FTP Online

Grand Central Communications Delivers Enterprise Class Integration With Today’s Essential Business Applications Through Certification Program

“By taking the critical next step of certifying connectors to these
services and applications, and standardizing how companies handle user
authentication for single sign-on and exception management, Grand Central has
taken the guesswork out of integration. This simplifies the user experience,
speeds integration, and greatly improves the success rate,” said
Ron Schmelzer, principle analyst of ZapThink LLC.

Read more at: Grand Central Press Release

Grand Central’s Certification Program

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg emphasizes that Grand Central’s approach “illustrates the power and flexibility of a business services network — you can do on-demand B2B integration, integrate with a service provider, use it for an enterprise service bus, and build portal capabilities on it.”

Read more at: Line56

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

The Benefits and Pitfalls of Service-Oriented Architecture

Presentation for Grand Central Webinar