SOA Strategy Comparison: IBM & Microsoft

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of best practices for organizing enterprise IT resources to support dynamic, flexible business processes. As an architectural approach, SOA is inherently platform, technology, and protocol neutral, so how well leading platform vendors are able to tell an accurate SOA story, while nevertheless seeking to promote their own platforms, is an interesting question.

It’s important to emphasize that it’s reasonable for any vendor to seek to explain how their offerings support their customers’ architecture efforts. SOA, however, sets the bar particularly high, as a core aspect of SOA is organizing heterogeneous resources to better support agile process requirements. It is important, therefore, to contrast how well platform vendors, and in particular Microsoft and IBM, position their offerings to support their customers’ efforts to deal with their inherent heterogeneity, without requiring them to solve heterogeneity problems by moving to a single vendor platform.

SOA发展重点应放何处

但是，ZapThink公司的Ron Schmelzer失望地指出，微软对开发人员的能力和需求的深入理解使它不愿意最大限度地发挥自己的潜力应用SOA，把SOA当作一个忘却的平台或者位置。

Read more at: ChinaByte.com

Microsoft donates code to Apache Stonehenge project

“In general, this is a big issue. The whole point of standards is to provide for interoperability, but so many are implemented in slightly different ways that the desired interoperability is not achieved,” said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg.

In many ways, that lack of standards interoperability is slowing down Web services efforts, and SOA has now outpaced Web services due to the standards challenge being faced, he added.

Standards interoperability is what allows mobile phones to work anywhere in the world, Bloomberg noted. “Imagine what has to happen to make that work. Handsets are working with local providers across infrastructures. In IT, there is nothing like that. It is still using stone knives and bearskins compared to the telecommunications world’s leverage of standards.”

Read more at: SD Times

ZapForum Podcast: Empowering Business Users with Self-Service Composite Application Platforms

ZapForum Podcast for December 16, 2008 features

Guest Expert Scott Caulk, Product Manager, IDV Solutions.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• learn about the role a self-service composite application plays in the enterprise
• understand what a situational application is
• Get an understanding of why location is an important visualization metaphor for situational applications.

Will SOA Fly in 2009?

ZapThink LLC senior analyst Ron Schmelzer sees Microsoft’s approach to SOA as problematic.

“We think that Microsoft is communicating the wrong message around SOA,” he says. “It’s focused on Web services integration. They say, ‘If you just build a bunch of Web services and run them on our platform you’ll have SOA.’ But we think they should show how Microsoft is applying SOA beyond just integrating Web services to provide some of the key benefits of SOA, like process-driven, recomposable services, and governed, managed, secure event services.”

ZapThink has been warning against taking an “ESB-first approach” to SOA, in which the enterprise service bus (ESB) is implemented first, and SOA is implemented almost as a platform. In a recent report, ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg writes that ESB as integration middleware can lead to escalating costs as needs evolve, possibly canceling out the ROI that might be gained in the first place. “Only by taking an architecture-first approach to SOA will organizations be able to achieve this benefit,” claims Bloomberg.

The two great promises of SOA — costs savings and greater agility — are essential elements of surviving an economic downturn, Bloomberg observes, but simply having a SOA initiative doesn’t guarantee success. “You have to get it right,” he warns. “When we see enterprises who’ve taken a SOA platform approach consider purchasing middleware for their middleware to scale their SOA initiatives, oblivious to the fact that following that path will prevent them from achieving the goals of SOA, all we can say is that we’ll be placing our bets on … the ones who are taking an architecture-first approach to SOA.”

Read more at: RedmondDeveloper News

Governance for .NET SOA Frameworks

SOA governance is an evolving concept that means different things to different people. ZapThink LLC Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer divides it into three flavors: “Design-time governance,” which ensures that when services are created they’re consistent with rules and policies; “runtime governance,” which makes sure that services in production are complying with rules and policies; and “change-time governance,” which controls versioning.

SOA Software is a likely partner to fill in this missing piece from Microsoft’s SOA offerings, Schmelzer says. Both do well among small and midsized businesses, and SOA Software addresses some areas where Microsoft hasn’t been pushing. While this latest move should help improve integration between .NET and other SOA platforms, SOA Software doesn’t command much of the SOA market today, Schmelzer says — but the extended pact has the potential to move both companies up the food chain.

Read more at: Redmond Developer

Microsoft joins messaging interoperability working group

“Support for an open standard like AMQP is consistent with Microsoft’s demonstrated commitment for other integration standards, most notably the Web Services family of standards. It fits in well with their standards-based integration strategy for increasing their presence in the enterprise back office,” said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg.

Read more at: SD Times

Coming Soon: BizTalk 2009 CTP

Longtime SOA observer Jason Bloomberg, managing partner of the consultancy ZapThink LLC, notes that the latest BizTalk Server will enable Web services integration with improved support for the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration standard, a registry that provides the schema for finding and invoking Web services.

However, Bloomberg questions whether BizTalk Server 2009 will emerge as a true SOA solution. “Microsoft is moving away from SOA, not toward it,” he says. “BizTalk is an integration tool that leverages Web services for standards-based integration, but offers little that helps organizations build the flexible services that form the core of a true SOA implementation.”

Read more at: Redmond Developer News

Movin’ on up

“Flash is consumed by 98% of Internet browsers,” said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. It’s not that other RIA development frameworks don’t work, he said. “But at this point there is just much more Flash.”

ZapThink’s Schmelzer also argued that “Flex is appealing to developers,” noting while Flash originated in the design world, Flex did not. Adobe acquired Flex when it bought Macromedia in 2005, and “Macromedia had roots in the development world,” Schmelzer said, citing the company’s ColdFusion offering, a programming language for creating dynamic Web pages.

Read more at: SD Times

Windows HPC Server released for parallel programming

“When Microsoft says they offer a SOA Job Scheduler, what they mean is that it supports a mode they call ‘Service Oriented Architecture mode’ that provides access to interactive applications through the Windows Communication Framework,” said Jason Bloomberg, a ZapThink analyst. “In other words, it provides services-based integration, but not SOA. This terminology is consistent for Microsoft, as they use the term ‘SOA’ to refer to services-based integration generally.”

Read more at: SD Times