JBoss Sets Sights on Open-Source SOA Supremacy with ESB

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, said, “Business Intelligence has an important role in process execution, and furthermore, as companies adopt SOA, we expect them to include BI in processes in much more flexible, business-focused ways.” And because SeeWhy offers both an enterprise edition and a community edition, he said, “It fits in with the model JBoss has.”

Read more at: eWeek

SeeWhy Software Partners With JBoss To Build Intelligent Business Processes With SOA

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, said: “Business intelligence has an important role in process execution, and furthermore, as companies adopt SOA, we expect them to include BI in processes in much more flexible, business-focused ways. To do this, BI needs to become real time, service-oriented, and a core component of the infrastructure companies need to build a business-relevant SOA.”

Read more at: AjaxWorld

JBoss expands SOA product set with new ESB

ZapThink LLC analyst Ron Schmelzer noted that claims of who has the better ESB will be hard to verify.

“The ESB craze has entered the final phase with JBoss entering the fray,” he said. “The real problem is that despite all these vendors entering the market, there is even more confusion about what specific features an ESB must have. Does it provide messaging? How about service composition? What about a security framework or a governance runtime? Does the ESB provide a service container in a hub-and-spoke manner or as a distributed intermediary? Or how about as a managed endpoint, no stuff in the middle required?”

What this makes for in many cases, according to Schmelzer, is confused end users.

“I’m hoping that firms like JBoss can at some point reduce the noise factor by focusing on specific SOA infrastructure capabilities and not on playing the game of buzzword bingo,” he said.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

ZapThink: Enterprises Not Buying Service-Oriented Architecture by Name; Consulting Firms Integrate SOA Best Practices with Business-Focused Offerings

BALTIMORE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sept. 6, 2006–ZapThink released a report today showing that few enterprises are specifically budgeting for or requesting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by name. Instead, business buyers budget for specific solutions to their business problems, and more consulting firms than ever before leverage Service Orientation best practices to provide those solutions. The main buyer of such initiatives has shifted toward the non-technical, business part of the enterprise.

“The clear pattern with today’s SOA projects is that they are increasingly business-focused,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “Many consulting firms are integrating SOA best practices into a broad differentiated offering that is not necessarily specific to SOA.”

ZapThink expects the percentage of IT projects overall that leverage Service Orientation best practices to continue to grow over time, and those best practices will soon become ubiquitous. ZapThink also expects the percentage of IT projects that are named, SOA-specific projects to peak in 2007, with Service Orientation best practices increasingly subsumed within the expected, routine part of IT projects more broadly after that date.

Key findings of the report include:

• Breaking up a large SOA initiative into multiple, discrete projects is an effective way to manage the risk of architectural change.
• Integration-centric offerings and technologies are taking a back seat to organizations’ need to improve their overall approach to enterprise architecture.
• Many SOA consulting providers are confused by product vendors who often distort the true message of SOA to best fit their product offerings.
• Many SOA consulting firms confuse architecture with implementation, causing significant issues in short-term SOA adoption.
• Average deal sizes for SOA projects range from an average of $150,000 for integration-focused efforts to several million dollars for enterprisewide and compliance-focused initiatives.

The report, available on ZapThink’s Web site at www.zapthink.com, features several firms offering SOA consulting services, including Accenture (NYSE: ACN – News), AgilePath, Alphacourt, Anexinet, Arc Aspicio, Avanade, BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS – News), BearingPoint (NYSE: BE – News), Bouvet, CapGemini (Paris), CherryRoad Technologies, City Practitioners, D. Callingham & Assoc., Daugherty Business Solutions, Definition 6, e-Brilliance, eSigma, gen-i, Geniant, Hitachi Consulting (NYSE: HIT – News), HP (NYSE: HPQ – News), IBM Global Services (NYSE: IBM – News), Infosys (NASDAQ: INFY – News), innoQ, IPT, Kanbay (NASDAQ: KBAY – News), Keane (NYSE: KEA – News), Lydian Technology, MITRE, Modhelus, Momentum SI, MphasiS, MW2 Consulting, Network Effects, Online Business Systems, PricewaterhouseCoopers, ProSolveIT, Satyam (NYSE: SAY – News), Schumacher Partners, Semantic Arts, SentientPoint, SilverTrain, SOA Software, SOA Systems, Software AG (Frankfurt), SRL Group, Statera, Summa Technologies, Synergy International, Systemiclogic, TasmanAve, TeamSOA, Tier1 Innovation, Voyant Group, Wipro (NYSE: WIT – News), WM-Data (Stockholm), and XWebServices. The report also mentions the following vendors: AmberPoint, Composite Software, Fiorano, Forum Systems, Infravio, LogicLibrary, Mercury (OTC: MERQ – News), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT – News), Mindreef, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL – News), Reactivity, RedHat (NASDAQ: RHAT – News), SAP (NYSE: SAP – News), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW – News), WSO2, and WebLayers.

Read more at: ZapThink Press Release

SOA Consulting: Current Market Trends

As the practice of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) matures, professional services firms that offer SOA-related services continue to lead the market in the creation and application of best practices for SOA. For this report, ZapThink surveyed 58 consulting firms who identified themselves as offering SOA consulting services in order to assemble a detailed, global picture of the state of the market for SOA consulting worldwide. ZapThink found a substantial maturation of SOA consulting offerings across the board, with an increased focus on the business value that SOA can provide. While there still remains some confusion over the nature and applicability of SOA, methodologies, engagements, and understanding of the SOA value proposition have all dramatically improved in the last few years to the point that SOA best practices are increasingly being taken for granted as the standard approaches for solving a broad range of business problems in organizations around the world.

BPM inside the belly of the SOA whale, part 2

“Any vendor who wants to have a credible SOA solution in order to build loosely coupled, composite, service-oriented applications will necessarily have to have a business process aspect to their product,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. “IBM, Oracle and Microsoft already have this capability as well as vendors like Sonic Systems, Fiorano and SOA Software. Even emerging composite application vendors like SEEC Systems, Webify Solutions, Tenfold and others are adding BPM capabilities to their SOA infrastructure. Vendors need to have process capabilities if they plan to have a credible solution in the space.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

The SOA-wise enterprise

Coming up with a comprehensive set of governance principles, however, is a daunting challenge. One that may put the dev team in the middle of corporate politicking. “You need governance but you don’t need to solve all the problems of the world,” says Jim Crew, formerly the director of data center infrastructure at Merrill Lynch and now a VP at SOA Software. Instead he recommends going with something that is good enough for now even if it isn’t complete or perfect.

ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg agrees with this approach: “We recommend you have a governance framework, but you don’t have to work out all the details before you start. Otherwise, you’ll end up with paralysis by analysis.” Bloomberg suggests pinning down a few key governance principles to start, such as how services will be reused and by whom.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg, who calls security the first roadblock to SOA, agrees: “People think that SOA is XML-based so a network firewall is all you need. Well, a firewall is not enough.”

He recommends implementing a wide range of emerging SOA security tools. These tools, such as AmberPoint SOA Management and SOA Software XML VPN Controller, act as intermediaries, often in the form of appliances. For example, XML accelerators and firewalls check the traffic against policies and lists, validate the XML schema, block malformed XML, and verify authentication and authorization. SOA gateways serve similar functions. Other appliances can federate identities among multiple systems. Products here include IBM Data – aPower XS40 XML Security Gateway and SOA Software’s XML VPN Appliance.

Read more at: Application Development Trends

W3C Approves Web Services-Addressing Standard

“WS-Addressing is one of those bread-and-butter standards that helps to grease the skids of making Web services work in heterogeneous environments,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink in Baltimore. “It’s been part of the overall WS-* conversation for the past two to three years, so it’s good that it’s finally been ratified by the W3C. The question now is about vendor support of the standard.

“We’ve seen support of the spec by many of the large vendors, but [are] not sure how many of the point-solution vendors of Web services and SOA [service-oriented architecture] products are currently supporting it. Now that it’s been approved by the W3C, hopefully we’ll get as close to a majority of vendors supporting the spec as possible,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: eWeek

SOA vendors link up for interoperability

SOA Link and other recent developments are evidence that SOA is moving beyond the “hype” stage, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Zapthink, which sells research to SOA firms.

“SOA’s not hype. SOA and Web services are moving beyond the ‘connect things together’ stage. We’re at a point where it’s becoming a part of the mainstream,” Schmelzer said.

“That’s a bit less sexy, because you’re getting down to brass tacks: implementation details, not the big news stories,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Red Hat, JBoss could disrupt SOA disruption

Zapthink’s Bloomberg sees the deal as a potential win-win-win-win.

“From Red Hat’s perspective, they are now able to leverage JBoss’s efforts to put together a suite of open source SOA infrastructure products,” he said. “From JBoss’s perspective, they are now able to leverage their suite into Red Hat’s customer base. From the commercial vendors’ perspective, Red Hat/JBoss represents a more formidable open source alternative, pushing them to add value at increasingly higher levels. And from the customers’ perspective, the more they can get their open source selections from the same vendor, the lower their risk.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices