Panel: How to sell SOA governance to a skeptical audience

Everybody wants governance, but nobody wants to be governed.

That statement by Ron Schmelzer sums up the conundrum faced by SOA advocates: governance is desperately needed to keep SOA projects on track and in focus. What happens, though, is SOA governance gets weakened and watered down by vested interests, or lack of motivation to make SOA work.

I recently had the opportunity to moderate an ebizQ panel on the topic of SOA governance, which genarated a lot of discussion on the challenges of selling governance to a skeptical audience that may not want to be governed. The panel consisted of a stellar line-up of industry experts including Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director with Burton Group; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner with ZapThink; David Bressler, SOA evangelist for the Actional products at Progress Software; Ed Horst, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AmberPoint; Frank Martinez, senior vice president, product strategy for SOA Software; and John Michelson, a founder and chief scientist of iTKO LISA. (Archived audio replay available here.)

Read more at: ZDNet

Experts to Hash out SOA Governance Best Practices at ebizQ’s Virtual Conference

ebizQ.net (http://www.ebizq.net), the Insider’s Guide to Business and IT Agility, today announced that six of the industry’s leading experts will participate in a panel discussion on SOA Governance and IT Governance during its September 24th SOA Governance virtual conference. The expert panelists include Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group, Jason Bloomberg of Zapthink, Frank Martinez of SOA Software, Dan Foody of Progress Software, John Michelsen of iTKO and Ed Horst of Amberpoint. The panel will be moderated by leading independent SOA analyst and ZDNet contributor, Joe McKendrick.

Read more at: eBizQ

ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap 3.0

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

ZapThink Announces Major Update to Popular SOA Implementation Roadmap Poster

ZapThink, the industry’s foremost experts, advisers, and educators in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture, is responding to customer demand with today’s publication of the third version of its popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster. The company distributed over 100,000 copies of its first two versions of the poster, the first in 2003 and then updated in 2005. The latest version adds cutting-edge thought leadership in SOA, includes detail on architectural artifacts, and expands coverage of SOA Quality, Enterprise Mashups, and more.

Read more at: Emediawire

Don’t Fret Debate: You’ve Got to Take Care of You and Your SOA

So, instead of getting in a tizzy about the ESB debacle, may I suggest you read ZapThink’s recent whitepaper, “Design and Validate SOA in a Heterogeneous Environment?”

It’s written to walk you through designing your own SOA. And — this is my favorite part — it tells you how you can use the technology you already have on hand. According to the whitepaper, you can use:

• An integration server for SOA service externalization, core information mediation, management of information flow, registry/repository support, and connectors, adapters and APIs;
• An application server for SOA service externalization, service development, some core integration capabilities, registry/repository support, SOBA development and some process integration capabilities;
• and, gasp, an ESB! An ESB can be used for SOA messaging processing and management, service externalization, registry and repository support, some core integration capabilities, and connectors, adapters and APIs.

Who could’ve dared written such a revolutionary document, you might rightly ask? David Linthicum — that’s right, the same man who was practically burned at the stake for suggesting too many ESBs in a SOA might be a problem.

Yeh, I know. I’ve mentioned Linthicum a lot this week. My editors may taunt me, but to be fair, he does some good stuff on integration and SOA. And, in many cases, it’s free — which is unusual for good material.

Speaking of free – did I mention this whitepaper is free? You just have to register with ZapThink, which is also free.

Read more at: IT Business Edge

Design & Validate SOA in a Heterogeneous Environment

The promised business value of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is driving many enterprises to purchase key SOA-related technologies, such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), in advance of the forthcoming architecture. However, the road to SOA is not always clear, and many enterprise architects, developers, and project leaders require guidance to understand the steps to SOA success. Such guidance must include clear, interactive, and adaptive process that ensures that team members understand all requirements, document all details, and plan all testing and implementation tasks.

The purpose of this manual is to walk those charged with designing and building their SOA implementation through the issues, steps, and procedures they require to create their first iteration of SOA, and how to build on that experience to drive a more systemic change within their enterprise. We’re going to take you through this journey assuming that you have the technology on hand, whether that is an integration server, application server, or an ESB, and focus on the best practices and architectural patterns for that particular category of technology. Since SOA is by nature heterogeneous, strategies for resolving architectural challenges earlier in the lifecycle using well-defined semantics will be discussed.

Systemic to this manual is how to approach testing in the context of SOA. While many consider testing as something that is at the end of the process, it’s actually a part of each step. Thus, as part of this manual we will teach you about testing approaches and key enabling technology.

Progress makes another SOA buy

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with the SOA consultancy ZapThink, called the deal “a huge, positive move for Progress” via e-mail.

“Not only does it bolster their ability to deliver high-quality SOA, but it also helps to reinforce the message that SOA is not just about Web services integration and ESBs [enterprise service buses],” he wrote. “SOA is about changing the way we think of and consume IT capabilities, and to do so in an environment of high quality requires a robust platform.”

ZapThink expects other SOA platform vendors to move in the direction of quality testing, perhaps through acquisitions of companies like as iTKO, he added.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

SOA acquisition week: Progress adds Mindreef

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., who earlier in the week said the Iona deal made good sense for Progress, also saw value in the Mindreef acquisition.

“Both the Mindreef and IONA deals are great moves for Progress,” Bloomberg said. “Governance, quality, and management are more important to SOA success than middleware is, so it’s a great sign that they’re adding SOA quality to the mix.”

Change management is a crucial piece of SOA that appears to be missing in many vendor offerings, the ZapThink analyst noted.

“After all, unless you enable broad-based service consumption and composition in environments of continual change, which is what SOA is all about, you can’t have effective SOA. It’s surprising that more SOA infrastructure companies haven’t made a deeper investment in SOA governance, quality, and management solutions, since they will rapidly realize that the success of their SOA initiatives depend on successfully addressing those issues.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

Practical SOA: Insurance

Presentations from ZapThink’s Practical SOA for Insurance event on May 16, 2008. Presented as a 232-slide PowerPoint in pdf format (large file). Agenda as follows:

Practical SOA London

All of the presentations from ZapThink’s Practical SOA event in London, UK on April 25, 2008.

The presentations include the following:

Welcome & World-Wide SOA Adoption Trends in 2008, Presenter: Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink, LLC

Case Study in SOA: GE Capital Solutions, Presenter: Nicolas Farges, Technical Architect, GE Capital Solutions Europe.

Case Study in SOA: ABN Amro – Achieving Enterprise Scale SOA, Presenter: Roy Varughese, Chief Architect, ABN AMRO (Global Clients)

Enterprise SOA patterns, Presenter: Francois Lascelles, Director of Client Solutions, Layer 7 Technologies

A Complete Strategy for Testing Web services, Presenter: Rix Groenboom, Parasoft

Redefining the Economics of Mainframe SOA, Presenter: David Little, Senior Technical Consultant (Shadow Products), DataDirect

Recession-Proofing your Company with SOA, Presenter: Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, Zapthink

251-slide PowerPoint in pdf format (large file).