Is Middleware or Poor Planning the Problem?

Middleware is supposed to solve integration problems, but some say its proliferation may cause more integration problems than it solves. For instance, in November, ZapThink wrote a piece arguing that one reason SOA hasn’t cut integration costs is because companies are using too much middleware.

Read more at: IT Business Edge

Filling Holes in the SOA Stack with Runtime Governance

ZapThink considers runtime SOA governance a requirement of successful SOA, greatly increasing the chances that the SOA implementation will have business value. Indeed, the lack of adequate runtime SOA governance greatly reduces the chances of success. The ability to create and monitor policies, manage performance, secure the system, and provide self-healing mechanisms means the SOA implementation will provide ongoing value through productivity benefits.

However, most SOA stack vendors do not address many of the key requirements of SOA, including solution patterns around runtime SOA goverance. Considering this limitation, it’s important to address these issues with the proper technology, leveraged in the proper way. Thus, the purpose of this paper.

JBoss Projects Form Red Hat SOA Stack

However, at least one analyst isn’t impressed. Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink, called the SOA platform “new labels on old stuff.”

He added that JBoss middleware has been “setting the bar for all the [competing] commercial products. All the commercial products have to be better than JBoss,” said Bloomberg, because the value proposition of these open-source projects is high enough to make them reasonable alternatives to expensive commercial solutions.

Read more at: SD Times

Web services-based app server upgraded by WSO2

WSO2 Application Server is differentiated by being built from the ground up for Web services and SOA, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink.

“What’s most notable in version 2.0 is the Eclipse integration, better clustering and high availability, support for EJB services, better security, and data services. Perhaps the most notable of these improvements are the data services, which help service-enable relational data from a variety of heterogeneous sources,” Bloomberg said.

“We’re finding that dealing with heterogeneous data issues is one of the technical stumbling blocks for many SOA implementations, and WSAS should help many enterprises address those issues,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Red Hat Enters Matrix On a Quest for SOA

But Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, thinks that Red Hat still has some building to do. “I would say there are other open source plays out there. There’s open source ESBs, and Iona bought LogicBlaze, but it’s not really about competing with those guys,” he said. “It’s about competing with commercial plays. It is a value-add. The key question is, how compelling it is? Red Hat’s overall challenge is that they don’t really have an overall SOA story.”

Read more at: SD Times

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

JBOSS Building a Hybrid Stack?

I found it surprising that IONA wasn’t mentioned in this article over at Application Development Trends in which Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink refers to LogicBlaze and WSO2 as \”running circles\” around RedHat. IONA has more expertise in distributed SOA infrastructure than any of the vendors mentioned. IONA offers a distributed, holistic solution, including the best open source technologies for services creation and communication between distributed endpoints that interoperate with the best proprietary technologies for things like high availability, security framework integration, and sophisticated registry/repository capability. IONA isn’t trying to build an integrated stack, but rather to enable lightweight, distributed SOA that is flexible and cost effective. IONA recently added the new Artix Registry/Repository product to solve the challenging problem of managing truly distributed services. Chris Horn has an interesting analogy between governing SOA and governing a nation over at his blog (you should definitely check out his blog if you haven\’t already).

Read more at: Linux World

SOA Software and Red Hat Partner To Support Web Services on JBoss

From SOA Software’s perspective, there’s little downside to this deal, observed ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg, because working with open-source middleware provides the company with a reference implementation for its customers who lack sufficient commercial middleware.

“But the real subtext here is that the Red Hat/JBoss combo has been a very weak player in the open-source SOA marketplace,” Bloomberg added. “So from their perspective, a partnership with SOA Software might help them get a leg up. However, partnering with a commercial software vendor is a risky move, because it dilutes the open-source value proposition.”

Read more at: ADT Magazine

SOA: The Business Behind The Hype

At its core, SOA is an architectural philosophy focused on flexibly linked, business process-oriented software components that leverage Web standards and services. It’s the latest evolution in the ever-shifting IT landscape. Major software makers, including SAP and Oracle, have made SOA design the foundation of their latest application suites. But because SOA is such an all-encompassing idea, it’s prone to a broad interpretation. A recent Aberdeen Group survey found that 90 percent of respondents said they have or are adopting SOAs in their business.

Analyst Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, a research firm that specializes in SOA topics, waves off such grandiose statistics. SOA momentum is gaining, but serious SOA projects are still at the early end of the adoption curve. Schmelzer estimated that perhaps 100 textbook SOA case-study projects were carried out last year.

“Anybody who is trying to do SOA is realizing that it’s a lot more involved than they might have thought,” Schmelzer said. “It’s pretty easy to put a Web services interface on anything. But to actually change the way you build applications so the services can consume those applications, well, that involves changing the way people build applications.”

“What would compel somebody to select one of [the pure-plays] when the big guys are adding features and acquiring companies constantly?” ZapThink’s Schmelzer said. “Companies just don’t like risk, so they’re first and foremost going to their existing technology providers.”

Read more at: CRN

Special report: Java EE 5 faces the SOA test, part 3

However, Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a senior architect at open source provider LogicBlaze Inc., said he is still seeing “people going outside of Java EE to look for solutions. That’s why customers are coming to us, why open source projects are there. The upgrade from 1.4 to Java EE 5 is a major shift from RPC-style Web services to annotated Web services. That’s good, but it’s just following what the open source community was already doing. And there are still a lot of organizations out there that run Java 1.4. Java EE 5 requires an upgrade to Java 1.5.”

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, said he’s “not seeing anybody interested in JAX-WS and JAXB. The Java world is getting very diverse, both on the commercial side and open source. It’s also getting noisy, which is an opportunity for Microsoft.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices