Two Ways To Deal With SOA’s Data Integration Challenge

“SOA starts to blur the difference between data and applications,” says Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, an SOA market research firm. When a set of applications performs some function, isolated as an independent service, the results can look a lot like data as they’re passed off to another application. Likewise, a query to a service that triggers a stored procedure in the database yields results that look a lot like an outcome of application logic. In services, data ceases to exist as something distinct from the application logic.

Not everyone is a fan of the iWay approach to integrating data across services. “I have always been somewhat skeptical,” says ZapThink’s Schmelzer, because it is too close to the old application-to-application integration of yesteryear, where each connection has to be set up individually and is inflexible.

Services need to be architected so that they yield data that can be consumed by various applications, although iWay’s Service Manager manages much of that task. Companies also need to be able to change how data is presented without altering the service interface. IWay, however, often requires an interface for each presentation rather than producing data that can be easily used across all of them, Schmelzer says.

Read more at: InformationWeek

iWay Jumps onto a Crowded ESB Highway

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, said that while adapters have a role to play in SOA it’s mostly for tactical deployments, not a core piece of SOA. He said that users need to be careful of what they’re buying when they go ESB shopping.

“As for ESBs, the market is still confused by the fact that the products that call themselves ESBs are still quite diverse in capability,” he said. “As a result, when customers say they want an ESB, they could mean very different things. What we’re seeing is that there’s a spectrum of approaches among the various SOA infrastructure products — some labeled ESB, some not. At one extreme are the tightly coupled EAI products with service interfaces, like SeeBeyond and webMethods. A bit less extreme are the application server-based ESBs like the IBM ESB and BEA’s AquaLogic service bus. In the middle is a product like the Sonic ESB, which does have the messaging infrastructure, but takes a more service-oriented approach to distributing the service containers than the ones mentioned above.

“At the opposite end of the spectrum would be peer-to-peer approaches linking intelligent Service endpoints, but the SOA marketplace is far from ready for this approach. Moving into the center from that extreme are the distributed intermediary approaches, like Blue Titan, SOA Software and also what companies like Cisco are envisioning. Then closer to the middle from them would be Cape Clear’s approach, which allows for, but doesn’t require a message transport.”

“Fundamentally, we see the middleware-centric ESBs of the first group as being in a transitional market,” Bloomberg said. “As companies eventually get wise that they just don’t need more middleware. After all, they already have a boatload of middleware and if they get more than one ESB, then they’ll need more middleware just to connect up their middleware. Eventually, the [network-base] distributed intermediary approach will gain ground, as this approach is more cost-effective, flexible, scalable and architecturally elegant than the middleware-centric approach.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

NetManage Looks to SOAs with Librados Buy

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg told internetnews.com NetManage is accomplishing a couple of things by acquiring Librados.

“The Librados adapter technology rounds out NetManage’s Host Services Platform, enabling them to offer service-oriented architecture capabilities to customers with a much broader range of host-based legacy applications,” Bloomberg said. “On the other hand, this acquisition opens up a new market for NetManage, as they bring the Librados technology to their customer base.”

On a competitive front, Bloomberg said the blend of NetManage’s business with Librados’ unusual licensed source code model promises better SOA enablement and more flexible legacy adapters.

“In other words, they’re positioning themselves to be an iWay killer,” he said, referring to iWay Software, a Librados rival and unit of Information Builders that currently offers more than 250 application adapters.

Read more at: InternetNews

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.