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

2005 a Record-Setting Year for LogicLibrary

ZapThink, LLC said Logidex improves efficiency and reuse of assets across an organization.

Read more at: Business Wire

Accelerating Demand for Systinet’s SOA Governance Solutions Spurs Record Growth

“The first half of 2005 has proved that an increasing number of enterprises are adopting SOA across their organizations to address the core business need for flexible, agile IT,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink LLC. “Enterprises and software vendors alike are increasingly realizing that businesses both large and small require SOA governance and lifecycle management to get value out of their SOA initiatives, and Systinet’s products are at the crux of this business-technology connection.”

Read more at: Systinet Press Release

The next step for meta data: Application integration

A meta data repository can help with integration in two primary ways, said Ron Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “It can help you access data you may not be aware of — loosely coupling the application source with the consumer — and it can help smooth differences between the information sources themselves.”

In addition, there is a shift going on in how people are approaching integration projects in general, said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Optimally, you don’t want to move information from one place to another and keep replicating it — like you do with the older extract-transform-load approaches.” The newer method, with much less impact on network traffic and system resources in general, is to “leave the information where it’s at” and create meta data and hooks to allow applications to use it right where it already exists, he noted.

While UDDI registries certainly can and do handle meta data, they are pretty much the “ugly ducklings” of the Web services world, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “UDDI as a standard isn’t really complete, so you wouldn’t go and buy yourself one. They always do other stuff, like LDAP or other things.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

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.

Solving Information Integration Challenges in a Service-Oriented Enterprise

As enterprises grow and evolve, they create and store their assets in a wide array of disparate systems and sources ranging from mainframes to relational databases, file systems to directories. However, in order for companies to realize the value of the information stored in these systems, they must integrate and connect the disparate silos of information in the enterprise. As such, today’s enterprises face an immediate challenge of connecting relevant systems in a manner that is flexible, cost effective, manageable, and reliable.

Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) offer compelling solutions for solving integration challenges in a standards-based, loosely coupled, business-oriented manner. However, Web Services address merely the interfaces between systems, applications, and data sources, and offers little, on its own, to solve information integration challenges. As a result, many users that have integration projects require access to data sources that are disparate and heterogeneous. Companies thus require a framework by which they can solve their application and data integration problems not just in a one project, piece-meal fashion, but with a reusable set of components that can be leveraged in future integration projects.

The most advanced Enterprise Information Integration (EII) solutions, in combination with Service-Oriented Integration (SOI), addresses these challenges by providing consolidated access to information and simplified application development through the isolation of the complexities of accessing data from multiple sources. While SOI addresses the integration of application, systems, and processes, bi-directional metadata and model-based EII approaches provide the underlying information integration that allows for coherent access to disparate information.

SOA Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra

ZapNote: MetaMatrix

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SOA Tools and Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

SOA Tools

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra