SOA Vendors Link For Interoperability

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer, whose research firm covers distributed computing, said it’s not particularly surprising that software powers are not there.

He said larger platform vendors will always push the fact that interoperability starts and ends with their platform primarily, and then secondarily to other products, while members of SOA Link know that other products, platforms, and infrastructure have to play in order for the group to prosper.

“This means that any SOA Link-implementing vendor acknowledges that they will interoperate with all other SOA Link vendors, including platform competitors,” Schmelzer said.

“It would be harder for the platform vendors to get a win by making such a claim. However, if customers start demanding this sort of vendor-neutral interoperability, then yes, at some point, these bigger fish will have to join the party.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Intalio Buys FiveSight Technologies

“This is more evidence of continued consolidation in the SOA/WS [service-oriented architecture/Web services] markets,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC. “There’s an interesting substory here about the lack of significant new startup activity in the space and the movement to consolidation and large-vendor dominance of the space.”

eWEEK.com Special Report: Service-Oriented Architecture

Indeed, said Schmelzer: “One of the interesting things to note is that even though there has been significant activity and dramatic upswing in the investment around service-oriented architecture and Web services, we haven’t seen nearly the amount of startup activity as we have in the past around similar waves of technology innovation. “In many ways, the space is consolidating around the larger vendors, such that much of the innovation is coming from established vendors, or at least being acquired by them. Only a small pocket of startup companies are emerging as companies capable of sustaining long-term viability while the others are getting acquired and consolidated at an increasing pace. Indeed, the market is seeming to favor consolidation and convergence of capabilities over emergence of new companies and best-of-breed approaches.”

Read more at: eWeek

BPM and Web services: A perfect match?, part 2

For BPM and Web services to work more effectively together, a third emerging technology — service-oriented architecture (SOA) — is important, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. In an SOA, software components and business processes can be exposed as services on the network and can often be reused for different applications and purposes, as well as combined in several ways.

“SOAs are the key” to the use of BPM, Schmelzer said. “When you create an SOA, at some point you have to define your business processes, because you can’t really build an SOA that’s not process-oriented.” Once you’ve defined those processes in an SOA, he said, you can best take advantage of BPM and tie it all together using Web services.

Schmelzer noted that several vendors already use BPM together with Web services in one way or another. In particular, he cited Intalio, FiveSight, Collaxa and a variety of startups, as well as BEA’s WebLogic integrator and IBM’s WebSphere integrator.

Schmelzer said that although he has seen some adoption of the two, the combination is still in its early phase. But that, he said, is because “SOA adoption is nascent, and companies are still trying to figure out SOAs.”

But once enterprises get serious about SOAs, which he sees happening over the next few years, the BPM-Web services combination will be increasingly important because “when you make the transition to an SOA, you absolutely need to define your business processes,” Schmelzer said.

Schmelzer and other analysts said the combination will be an increasingly important part of an enterprises IT architecture in the future.

Read more at: TechTarget

BPEL: Why Everyone Is Doing It

With this backing, and in less than two years since being unveiled, BPEL has become the de-facto orchestration language standard, bypassing a number of alternative specifications such as BPML and WSCI. Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink says “It’s a foregone conclusion that BPEL is becoming the accepted standard for business process execution. It addresses 80 percent of the need, and people are rallying behind it. BPEL’s a done deal.”

Read more at: Web Services Pipeline (CMP)

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Intalio, Ultimus Ship Web Services Support in BPM Upgrades

Analysts say Intalio and Ultimus are following a trend among BPM vendors to adopt web services technology. “What makes these systems different than in the past is that they’re now exposed as services,” Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said. “In the past, the technologies used proprietary process engines to execute the flow (of data).”

Read more at: TechWeb

Will BPEL and WSCI Come Together?

“There’s nothing at all surprising about Sun’s changing their mind, as their software strategy has been rudderless for over a year now. When you put this week’s change of direction in the context of all the zigzags Sun has been making since Web Services got off the ground, it might look like Sun is desperate — and maybe they are,” said ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Sun Joins OASIS’ BPEL Committee

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass., market research firm ZapThink LLC, said Sun’s move “is a very good move for Sun and the industry as a whole. There seems to be consolidation around WSBPEL as the specification of choice for orchestration and choreography, and as such, it makes sense not to split efforts between different standards groups, but rather to coalesce on a single spec. Without this agreement, it will take the wrangling of the WS-I [Web Services Interoperability Organization] to sort this all out.”

Read more at: eWeek

OASIS Forms Committee to Promote BPEL

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm, said: “The submission of BPEL to OASIS is a great step for BPEL as well as Web Services in general. BPEL is a key specification aimed at providing a mechanism by which Web Services can be orchestrated into business processes, which can then be exchanged and choreographed with external processes. Business process is a critical aspect of adoption of Web Services and especially Service-Oriented Architectures since business processes are how companies define their business requirements that must then be implemented with Web Services. Without process, all you have is a jumble of Web Services. Specifications like BPEL bring order to the chaos by specifying a logical flow by which Web Services can be orchestrated to meet defined business requirements.”

Read more at: eWeek

Service-Oriented Process

Download File