European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

I’m in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink’s Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I’ll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories.

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We’ve posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term “SOA” can polarize some IT teams – it’s an “either/or” decision at the architectural level.

Read more at: SOA World

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Frankfurt Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 8, 2008 features:

Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Ingo Arnold, Enterprise Systems Architect, Novartis Pharma AG

Wolfgang Otto, Principal Systems Engineer, BEA Systems

Florian Mösch, Vice President Enterprise Integration & Architecture, T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH

Jason English, iTKO, iTKO

Dr. Waldemar Lohrer, Senior Berater, Swiss Life

Tim Hall, SOA Center Product Management, Hewlett-Packard

Lars Drexler, VP Sales Enablement, Software AG

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA event in Frankfurt, Germany, on January 15, 2008.

The Next SOA Vendor to Be Acquired!

This blog asks “Who are the SOA centric companies that have not yet been acquired?” as if they are the ugly ducklings of the SOA dating game no one wants to marry.

Joe McKendrick also writes about this subject in his April 19, 2007 dated blog entry entitled “The incredible shrinking SOA vendor pool: good or bad?” referring to David Linthicum’s opinions: “Dave Linthicum, who has been involved in plenty of IT vendor acquisitions, has been keeping tabs on the churning SOA vendor space, and estimates that anywhere between three to four dozen SOA specialty vendors have been acquired in just the last couple of years. Isn’t that a good thing? For the investors in these companies, yes. But for SOA innovation, no, Dave says. In fact, we may be losing our competitive edge in SOA as a result.”

Read more at: Sys-Con

The SOA Governance Timeline

Governance consists of creating, communicating, and enforcing policies in a corporate environment. In many ways, it is the key to maintaining the balance between executive control and employee and customer empowerment.

Implementing SOA requires governance in order to ensure 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. Because of these two characteristics, enforcing policies and leveraging SOA best practices, it is critical for all organizations to deploy SOA governance as soon as they begin their SOA initiative.

With its acquisition of Mercury and its Systinet division, HP has propelled itself into a leadership position in the SOA governance space. HP is well-positioned to help its customers leverage SOA for IT governance, and more broadly, for corporate governance.

HP launches SOA on the world

As part of the announcement, HP is also offering service support to companies that are ready to move beyond the initial pilot stage of SOA development. Zapthink analyst Ron Schmeltzer doesn’t think this puts HP quite in the same league as IBM with respect to SOA, citing a lack of a home-grown middleware company as a disadvantage:

IBM has an advantage over HP in SOA, said Schmelzer, because HP doesn’t own a middleware software company. That means HP can provide software and consulting to manage an SOA deployment, but they can’t actually run an SOA-based service except by partnering with a middleware provider.

But we know from past experience that HP and its own middleware companies tend to mix like oil and water.

Read more at: InfoQ

HP, IBM Try to Shift SOA Rollouts Into Higher Gear

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Baltimore, Maryland-based ZapThink LLC, said, “I think it’s much more helpful to think of it as ‘architecture oriented towards services,’” Schmelzer said.

Schmelzer is of the opinion that HP’s rollout is a sure sign that indicates its is working on the benefits received via the USD 4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive and its Systinet division, which focuses on SOA governance and life cycle management software.

Read more at: SDA India

HP SOA strategy leans toward runtime governance

As unveiled this week, the HP SOA strategy focuses on a combination of products integrating HP OpenView integrated with the technology acquired from Mercury/Systinet to provide governance, quality and management, along with services and education. With a strong and historic reputation in testing, quality control and consulting services, this strategy plays to HP’s strengths, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

“Consulting has always been a strength for HP and they have a lot of experience,” Schmelzer said. “They’ve been doing things both on the Java side and the .NET side. HP has a very robust .NET practice, as well as on the SAP and Java side. That is unique. IBM is not really going to offer companies .NET consulting. People mistakenly think of HP as being in the Java camp, but they are much more heterogeneous. They support .NET and Java equally.”

Schmelzer applauded HP’s plan to focus its consultancy on creating SOA centers of excellence within organizations seeking to adopt the architecture, which is in line with the ZapThink position that IT cannot implement SOA simply by buying tools.

“What they’re acknowledging is that the technology part can only help companies so much in their drive to adopt service-oriented architecture,” Schmelzer said. “If you give someone a bunch of technology and say, ‘Go build SOA,’ the rate of success is not that high. HP is not offering an implementation. They are saying, ‘We’re going to help you set up an organizational structure that helps you build your own services.’ It’s a mentorship. It’s helping companies establish a real enterprise architecture group.”

In this sense, Schmelzer said criticism from other vendors that HP is hampered by not having SOA developer tools misses the point.

“I don’t see that as a negative,” Schmelzer said. “Why should HP get into the development picture? They don’t have a runtime environment. They don’t have integration middleware. They don’t have a programming language or a development environment. If you’re HP you don’t care about what runtime environment customers are using. In the context of HP not having development tools is very consistent. If they had something it would actually be very inconsistent. It would be inconsistent for HP to prefer one development environment over another.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

HP says SOA is ready for prime time

Analyst Ron Schmelzer said whenever he’s confused about what SOA is, he turns the acronym backwards: AOS. “I think it’s much more helpful to think of it as architecture oriented towards services,” said Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink.

Schmelzer thinks the HP announcement is the first indication of the strategy HP is developing from its $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury, which included a company Mercury acquired called Systinet. Mercury specialized in business optimization software and Systinet in SOA governance and lifecycle management software.

IBM has an advantage over HP in SOA, said Schmelzer, because HP doesn’t own a middleware software company. That means HP can provide software and consulting to manage an SOA deployment, but they can’t actually run an SOA-based service except by partnering with a middleware provider.

Read more at: InfoWorld

HP: SOA Is Ready for Prime Time

Analyst Ron Schmelzer said whenever he’s confused about what SOA is, he turns the acronym backwards: AOS. “I think it’s much more helpful to think of it as architecture oriented towards services,” said Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

Schmelzer thinks the HP announcement is the first indication of the strategy HP is developing from its US$4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury, which included a company Mercury acquired called Systinet. Mercury specialized in business optimization software and Systinet in SOA governance and lifecycle management software.

IBM has an advantage over HP in SOA, said Schmelzer, because HP doesn’t own a middleware software company. That means HP can provide software and consulting to manage an SOA deployment, but they can’t actually run an SOA-based service except by partnering with a middleware provider.

Read more at: PC World

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