SOA: Building the Roadmap

Written by ZapThink Associate Analyst Tony Baer.

By now, most Information Technology (IT) organizations have become aware of the potential of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to pierce through those silos. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, implementing SOA should be an incremental, iterative process that should start modestly. Your first foray into a SOA implementation should be through a pilot project, where your organization has the opportunity to conduct an evaluation to determine whether to make further investments. The goal is gain experience while mitigating the risks. Consequently, the scope of the pilot should be limited. Choose a handful of Services that will make a difference, and that people will notice.

Governance is essential. Lacking governance, SOA projects become yet another example of undisciplined software development. As your organization becomes more experienced with SOA, it eventually learns to compose business Services bridging those silos, and gradually becomes more efficient to the point where SOA supports business processes to the point where you can continuously optimize your business.

From a starting point of point-to-point integration, organizations evolve to developing more flexible dynamic couplings that exploit far more effectively the Services that they have exposed. At that point, governance becomes essential if SOA is to evolve beyond isolated, discrete connections to support an environment where Service contracts drive development, Services become composable, and the agility that SOA promises becomes reality.

The Value of SOA Governance

The definition of corporate governance is creating, communicating, and enforcing policies in a corporate environment. Governance is the key to balancing executive control with employee and customer empowerment across the enterprise. While many corporate governance activities don’t directly involve the information technology (IT) department, the enterprise does call upon IT to provide tooling for automating policy creation and enforcement, when it’s possible to represent policies in a machine-understandable format.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources to meet the changing needs of the business in flexible ways. Governance is an essential part of any SOA implementation, because it ensures 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.

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

Software AG Buys WebMethods for $546M

“This is huge news in the SOA space, because the combination of Software AG and WebMethods is now second only to IBM in terms of both traditional integration and SOA capabilities,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, an SOA market analysis company. “Software AG gets a much stronger North American presence, and they can now leave the likes of TIBCO and Oracle in their dust. Mark my words; Larry Ellison is not going to be happy about this news.”

Read more at: eWeek

Iona enters the SOA registry/repository business

Placing it among the existing players, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., said: “What’s most unique about the Iona reg/rep is that it’s at version 1.0, while HP Systinet Registry, webMethods Infravio X-Registry and LogicLibrary Logidex are now all quite mature products. Even the IBM WebSphere Service Registry/Repository, a relative latecomer, has been on the market longer.”

ZapThink’s Bloomberg said, “The Iona entry arguably makes sense for current Artix customers, but there’s nothing in their announcement that would tempt anyone else.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

webMethods: Combining Business Process Management and SOA to Support Dynamic Processes

Familiar to enterprise IT as an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) vendor, webMethods has fully reworked their product line into a fully featured, process focused SOA platform. webMethods Fabric 7.0 now offers codefree process creation based on Service composition, process visibility, SOA governance and lifecycle management.

webMethods Fabric 7.0 provides both business integration and optimization capabilities. Fabric integrates, assembles and optimizes business processes enabling customers to leverage their existing assets to increase business process productivity.

Enterprise architects and IT managers who are looking to implement process-focused SOA in their organizations should shed any preconceived notions about webMethods and take a new look at Fabric’s comprehensive SOA infrastructure capabilities.

iTKO Has New Partners in Its Corner

“Maintaining quality as an organization moves to a SOA adds additional challenges to the exiting quality management environment,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at analyst firm ZapThink. “By integrating iTKO LISA with HP Quality Center, QA personnel can leverage their existing skills and processes while adding the additional tasks that SOA quality requires in an efficient, low-risk manner,” he added.

Bloomberg believes that such partnerships will add to iTKO’s competitive advantage and are critical at this point in its growth trajectory while it has the resources to invest.

Read more at: SD Times

Miko Matsumura on SOA winners and losers for 2007

So architects need help with SOA education?
Matsumura: Emerging is this model where there’s this enlightened architect figure and then there’s a need for that figure to team up with a bigger partner to actually help scale up the education piece. There’s also a ZapThink prediction for 2007 that there will be a shortage of visionary architects. As SOA starts becoming an in-demand function, these individuals themselves will be in short supply. What’s noteworthy is that there is a lot of reliance in SOA is on specific types of people. These projects tend to be anchored by people who get it. What we need for SOA education is to have some people who get it help propagate that knowledge across the organization. That’s going to be another 2007 hot button, which is the shortage of qualified visionary architects.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Miko Matsumura on ‘cybernetic’ SOA, part 1

Matsumura: When you have long running asynchronous services, you end up with human beings as part of the service delivery infrastructure. This is discussed in a ZapThink paper called “The Mechanical Turk.” Back at the turn of the last century, there was this chess playing robot. It was not powered by an IBM super computer, obviously, but, in fact, this chess playing robot was powered by a human being sitting in the back room like the Wizard of Oz. So they were cheating and tricking people, but if you think of a business service, for example, say I order a book on Amazon. The question becomes: “Will human beings touch my book?” Probably. “Will human beings be driving the vehicle that causes the book to move to my house?” Most definitely. I hope so. So as SOA services become business services you get a natural progression of interaction between machine based systems, services that are the IT granularity, and the business services that are more human driven. It happens because human beings are adaptable and flexible, which actually provides for a natural optimization that is pretty exciting.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

webMethods integrates Infravio’s SOA street cred

“What they’re going to gain is SOA thought leadership,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, who attended webMethods’ user conference, Integration World, in Washington D.C. this week. He found the webMethods trade show had a new energy, which he attributed to the infusion of “DNA” from Infravio.

Schmelzer had gotten much the same impression from talking to webMethods customers at the show.

“They don’t want to rip and replace,” he said.
Schmelzer said he is impressed with the merging of the two company’s products, as it was unveiled at the webMethods show.

“It wasn’t an old company trying to bolt something new onto their product,” he said. “It’s merging very well.”

The ZapThink analyst also said the feel of the show was different from past webMethods events.

Read more at: SearchWebServices