ZapThink Announces SOA for Managers Certification Course at IMPACT 2009

BALTIMORE, MD (PRunderground) March 26, 2009 — ZapThink announces today the availability of its SOA for Managers course co-located at IBM’s IMPACT 2009 conference in Las Vegas, NV on May 3, 2009. In this one-day course, attendees will get detailed guidance and expertise in how to implement and manage SOA with the latest best practices and methods. The one day event will feature Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partners with ZapThink as lecturers and contributors.

“Companies want to know how apply SOA best practices to enhance and optimize their existing investments in IT,” said Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner with ZapThink. “This one-day, practical event will give enterprises of all sizes, architecture practitioners, consulting firms, and technology vendors the best practices and practical implementation knowledge they are seeking.”

Key topics addressed during the one-day event on May 3, 2009 in Las Vegas, NV include:

• Fundamentals of SOA
• Defining SOA Success
• SOA: A Business Service View
• Service Composition: Supporting Business Process with Services
• Overcoming SOA Challenges
• SOA Funding and Budgeting challenges
• SOA Pitfalls and growing pains
• SOA Project Management best practices
• Governance and security strategies for SOA
• Ensuring EA and SOA organizational success
• SOA and Legacy
• Iterative approaches to SOA projects
• IT Governance Feedback Loop
• The future of the Service-oriented Enterprise application

“Impact 2009 includes more than 300 client speakers and exciting keynotes to help attendees learn how to use SOA to reuse existing investments, cut costs and increase revenue,” said Sandy Carter, VP, IBM SOA and WebSphere. “By offering ZapThink’s SOA for Managers workshop, we are adding another key element to help attendees advance their SOA knowledge.”

Attendees will gain a working understanding of SOA, understand how SOA can benefit their organization, learn about the pitfalls that organizations implementing SOA face, and how to avoid them, and receive a “SOA for Managers” Certificate or a “SOA for Managers” endorsement of an existing Licensed ZapThink Architect certification.

IMPACT 2009 is the industry’s premier SOA conference, offering attendees access to key business leaders who provide practical knowledge based on their personal SOA experiences. For more information on IMPACT, or to register for the event visit: http://www.ibm.com/soa/impact2009/vip.

For more information about the ZapThink SOA for Managers Certification course and additional ZapThink training events, visit http://www.zapthink.com/eventreg.html. Early registration discounts are available.

Read more at: ZapThink

SOA Strategy Comparison: IBM & Microsoft

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of best practices for organizing enterprise IT resources to support dynamic, flexible business processes. As an architectural approach, SOA is inherently platform, technology, and protocol neutral, so how well leading platform vendors are able to tell an accurate SOA story, while nevertheless seeking to promote their own platforms, is an interesting question.

It’s important to emphasize that it’s reasonable for any vendor to seek to explain how their offerings support their customers’ architecture efforts. SOA, however, sets the bar particularly high, as a core aspect of SOA is organizing heterogeneous resources to better support agile process requirements. It is important, therefore, to contrast how well platform vendors, and in particular Microsoft and IBM, position their offerings to support their customers’ efforts to deal with their inherent heterogeneity, without requiring them to solve heterogeneity problems by moving to a single vendor platform.

SOA联手“开放源代码”改写IT规划方程式

众多的企业和机构还在睡眼惺忪之际，业内的领头羊和冒险者早已张开了激情的臂膀来拥抱这个先机了。诱惑正在引发商机。IT行业分析公司 Gartner 认为SOA将成为创建和交付软件的主导框架，同时预测到2010年时，应用软件收入增长的80%将来自基于SOA的方案，另据美国专注于软件应用领域的咨询公司Zapthink的报告，全球SOA的市场规模将会由2005年的44亿美元猛增到2010年的430亿美元，5年的时间里将有近10倍的增长。另一方面，开源社区也越来越活跃，IBM、Oracle、AMD、BEA等都在支持和实施一些开源计划。很明显，开源不光针对商用，SOA也不光是针对系统集成，这两二因素正酝酿IT的一场技术机制与商业模式的变革。同时这也构成了新的行业“洗牌”动因。

Read more at: www.itxinwen.com

SOA: Wanted Dead or Alive

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, said: “We’ve been seeing this trend for a few years now — the business doesn’t want ‘SOA,’ never did. The business wants solutions to problems. ‘SOA’ has become a bad word. But SOA — that is, the best practices of service orientation — are vitally important, broadly adopted, and now mainstream. After all, you can’t do Cloud Computing without SOA — but you can definitely do it without ‘SOA.’ The bottom line is that SOA is a somewhat loose collection of architectural best practices. It’s up to the architects to know which best practices are appropriate for solving the business problem at hand. And as it happens, one of those best practices is not to call what you’re doing ‘SOA.’”

Bloomberg’s ZapThink partner, Ronald Schmelzer, said, “To say SOA is dead, either as a term or as a concept is misguided.” Schmelzer said SOA never had sex appeal, but it was never meant to have it.

“So, is ‘SOA’ dead either as a concept or simply as a term,” Schmelzer asked in an interview with eWEEK. “Of course not. What has replaced it? What explains its lack of value? The concepts we now discuss are other ones, or ones that simply build on the ideas of SOA. SOA has simply faded from the limelight as other new topics command our attention. But as a foundational concept of computing, and one that companies still struggle to implement, SOA is alive and well.”

Schmelzer took his argument a step further, noting that there has been a surge in SOA training and SOA engagements over the past year. He added:

“Anne is simply in the echo chamber, and the chamber has stopped echoing on the topic of SOA. So what? Now, let’s get down to details and make this thing work. Show me a company that has truly mastered agility and flat cost of change in the face of continuing heterogeneity, and I’ll say we have achieved SOA success. All the rest are on that path. To say it’s not worth it to pursue that path is misguided. To say that since the topic of SOA has faded from the pundits’ view is evidence of its demise is equally misguided.”

Read more at: eWeek

SOA modeling language readied

An analyst lauded SoaML for not being too centered on Web services, which has sometimes been considered synonymous with SOA.

“While it would be more accurate to call this a service modeling and design language (because SOA modeling language doesn’t have particular meaning), it is good that they are not overly committing their language to Web services,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “I think by now, we all realize that SOA and Web services are not at all the same thing. In this regard, I think the specification will be another step in the path to helping companies realize the important of modeling their architecture separate from modeling the underlying technology.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

New Group Promotes Web Services Interoperability

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, said he wonders why the WS-I wasn’t enough. Said Schmelzer:

In some ways the efforts of the WSTF is redundant with the efforts of the WS-I, but then again, the WS-I hasn’t been doing much in the past few years. In fact, it’s pretty notable how absent the WS-I has been from SOA efforts in the past few years. The fact that we would need a new organization to focus on interoperability scenarios says much about the inability of the industry to come to any long-term agreement on these things. Also, the fact that it is always the same group of vendors rearranging the deck chairs on the interoperability question really makes one wonder whether the vendors will ever be able to champion the task of interoperability on their own. Perhaps a consortium of the largest IT buying end users should be in charge instead?

Read more at: eWeek

Real World Processing with Events, SOA & Web 2.0

Today’s exploding numbers of business events, both combining with and driving the exponential growth of information in the business world, are increasing the need for Business Event Processing (BEP). This increased reliance on business events also leverages thethe collaborative, Internet-based technologies of Web 2.0, as well as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), providing a flexible approach to obtaining value from events. The combination of these three approaches provides a foundation for flexibility, visibility, composability, integration, and scalability.

The bottom line, however, is the business story. BEP, combined with Web 2.0 and SOA, are bridging the gap between business and IT better than any of these approaches can separately. Today’s organizations require real time visibility into their business, as well as the ability to process business events to solve business problems, what we call Real World Processing.

Such solutions will have broader impact on the business itself and can create new competitive models in any industry where forward looking companies implement them. Furthermore, companies who exploit the power of BEP will be better positioned to understand threats and take advantage of opportunities, and will therefore have a competitive advantage within their industry.

Investing in SOA in a Down Economy

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down another 600 points at the time of writing this ZapFlash. Banks, investment houses, and insurance firms are succumbing to a combination of tight credit markets and their own bad decision-making. Consumers are feeling the pinch at gas pumps, grocery stores, facing home foreclosures, …

Tibco Beefs up Business Events Processing Wares

Pretty much any of the established companies in the CEP space are worth a look, said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink.

But it’s often tough to say whether one company’s product is truly faster or more scalable than another without knowing, for example, what kind of events are being processed, he added: “Are they all inside a network? Are they distributed far and wide? It it one proprietary system, or spread across a heterogeneous environment?”

Read more at: PCWorld

ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap 3.0

Download or purchase ZapThink’s popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster!