Reaching the SOA Tipping Point

The core benefits that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises–cost reduction, increased business visibility, business empowerment, and greater business agility–are becoming increasingly understood and sought after, but the fact remains that many organizations are still struggling with various challenges in the early stages of their SOA initiatives. Many such challenges are organizational and political, and as a result, many well-meaning SOA initiatives have devolved into stopgap measures and political compromises. Such projects risk failure, delays, and cancellations.

To avoid such pitfalls, it’s increasingly important for organizations to take a pragmatic approach to SOA adoption that achieves business goals under the radar, building momentum and business value iteratively. For architects who are fed up with the status quo of IT and can see the big picture of the SOA value proposition for their organizations, taking such a pragmatic approach can be the most effective way to achieve the SOA tipping point, where the organization as a whole comes to accept and value SOA as mainstream across their organizations.

Leveraging SOA for Agile Business Processes

Enterprises around the world are facing a momentous transformation, as they move away from traditional, inflexible approaches to leveraging information technology (IT) resources to a more agile way that helps to improve business process. This transition from an aggegration-centric view of technology that leads to brittle assemblages of heterogeneous assets to the composition-centric view that positions IT resources as flexible services that the business can compose together to support and manage flexible processes heralds a new era of value to organizations. Underpinning this transition is the move to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which provides best practices for organizing IT resources to enable organizations to better leverage business change.

More on the SOA Governance Thing

I had a few good responses to my blog post on SOA Governance.

The purpose of the post was to define the patterns found in SOA Governance tools, and it is indeed okay to define those patterns. Not sure it’s “dangerous,” just adds clarity for those looking at these tools. In essence, that was the purpose of the post. I should have been clearer about that.

Read more at: InfoWorld

How to Define a Business Service

How to define a Business service is a pervasive and critical question that is essential to the success of any Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative. SOA projects can consist of too many moving parts causing confusion on what to use, reuse, or leverage. It then becomes the challenge of the architect to reduce this confusion by identifying the proper best practices for defining Services properly to meet the business goals set out for them.

Such practices include a variety of approaches. Architects can define a Service:

• in the context of business processes
• in the context of existing assets leveraging the business, information that the Service is expected to send or receive
• in an iterative fashion that delivers business value and decreases risk.

Combined with SOA governance processes that alleviate the challenges with managing too many moving parts, the architect will have the necessary best practices to manage the art and science of Service definition and accelerate SOA adoption.

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

SOA Implementation Best Practices

The role of SOA is to provide an architectural approach that supports an organization’s ability to support ongoing business change in the face of a heterogeneous environment. However, since SOA does not introduce a new programming language or runtime environment, organizations must implement code that underpins and exposes a Service interface somehow. Since implementation matters to computers as much as architecture matters to people, it makes sense to consider the runtime environment of the implementation to be a good place to coordinate Service interactions.

When looking at the technology buying patterns in the world of SOA, there is one common thread. The influence of the larger SOA vendors is very much a force in the market today. Within this context, and given continued consolidation, confusion, and change in the SOA marketplace, organizations should make a careful evaluation of the various vendor offerings that support SOA implementations. The consolidation of SOA implementation capabilities has yielded a collection of vendors offering the new solution stack: the “SOA Platform”.

When comparing vendors, it is important to verify how their products and services address both parts of the lifecycle. If the vendor’s own products or services address the full lifecycle, what is their strategy for interoperating with other vendors whose products or services fill the gap? Are vendor platforms just an amalgam of acquired, partnered, and separately developed technologies, or do they represent a cohesive collection of agile SOA infrastructure that supports the widest range of SOA capabilities? This report aims to identify SOA platform vendors and help make the evaluation using the above criteria.

Defining a Business Service

Pointers for how to define a business Service, including a discussion of Service granularity and the business Service abstraction. Presents a clear distinction among Service implementation, Service interface and abstracted Business Service.

Presented at a Software AG Webinar on October 24, 2007.

16-slide PowerPoint in pdf format.

Justifying & Funding your SOA Project

Many organizations struggle to build the business case for implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)–not because SOA doesn’t provide numerous benefits to the organization, but rather because they don’t properly identify the business problems in their organization that SOA would be particularly well suited to address.

This paper addresses this deficiency by delineating the most important business benefits of SOA: reduction in the cost of integration, achieving asset reuse, increasing business visibility, and achieving business agility. Implementing SOA to achieve these benefits, however, requires many capabilities that fall under the broad umbrella of SOA governance, including visibility into IT assets, change management, enforcement of best practices, measurement of effectiveness, collaboration capabilities, lifecycle management, and open standards support.

Governance at core of Software AG SOA strategy

Following Monday’s Webinar, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., was guardedly optimistic about the company’s chances of success after listening to Totev’s presentation. The analyst was impressed with Software AG’s emphasis on governance.

“They lead with SOA governance, which is an important priority for them to have,” he said. “Another key strength is that their ESB vision focuses on a mediation version and an orchestration version, two capabilities that are more critical to SOA infrastructure than simple integration is. Also, their business process tooling is unsurprisingly quite strong, as both companies had good, SOA-capable products in this space going into the merger.”

As for the German-based company’s ability to sell itself in the American market, Bloomberg sees that as being more problematic although not undoable if Software AG can successful blend its culture with the Virginia-based webMethods and California-based Infravio.

“Perhaps their greatest challenge, although it’s too early to say it’s a weakness, is pulling the cultures together so that they can be strong in the US market while remaining strong in Europe and elsewhere,” Bloomberg said. “In the past they have been ‘too German’ in many ways to do well in the US, so we’ll have to see if the new webMethods blood can tone this down.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Software AG CentraSite Community

Written by Tony Baer, Associate Analyst, ZapThink.

Governance is drawing significant attention from the boardroom down as a result of heightened regulation, increased competition, and constant change in the marketplace. There are two faces to SOA governance. On one hand, SOA governance simply means governing a SOA implementation initiative—for example, communicating corporate policies to developers implementing Services, and giving them the tools they need to follow those policies as they assemble the various elements of the SOA implementation. On the other hand, there’s a broader, more strategic definition of SOA governance: IT governance in the context of SOA.

Software AG takes a big picture view to SOA governance, based on the premise that SOA governance extends well beyond the governing of Web Services. It believes that the extensible nature of SOA requires a similarly extensible strategy to governance. Software AG has established the CentraSite Community as its strategy for providing a SOA governance solution that customers can adapt to their unique business and technology needs. Organizationally, the CentraSite Community promotes shared wisdom through its collaborative online presence. Architecturally, Software AG CentraSite registry/repository supports the community through its extensible data model and broad standards based approach. Because the CentraSite Community does not impose a one-size-fits-all governance solution, customers can implement the right governance recipe to meet their unique business needs.