ZapForum Podcast: A Multi-Role Approach to SOA

ZapForum Podcast for October 18, 2007 features

Guest Expert Jim Murphy, Vice President of Product Management, Mindreef.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Identify the various roles that people must play to form an effective SOA team
• Understand the various relationships that SOA fosters, for example, between architects and quality assurance personnel
• Learn to recognize and avoid the pitfalls that diverse SOA teams can introduce

David S. Linthicum: Is SOA Quality a Priority?

SOA testing is in the media a bit these days as those who implement SOA have to make sure those new services, abstraction layers and orchestrations are ready for prime time. However, the common approach to SOA deployment is: development now, requirements maybe, and testing if we have the time. You can’t afford to make that mistake; there is too much on the line with this stuff.

Indeed, a recent study by Nucleus Research discovered that existing SOA implementations achieved limited success when considering ROI. Only 37 percent of enterprises have achieved a positive return on their investments from SOA deployments. While the root cause of these low ROI numbers can be attributed to many factors, the key issues relate to a lack of planning and a lack of testing.

Read more at: Life is a Jeopardy

SOA quality is job one

You can build a complex house of cards, but when you’re finished, it’s still a house of cards.

The same is true of service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications built without comprehensive quality assurance, says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC. If one of the primary goals of using the SOA approach is agility, it will fall apart if quality isn’t built in to the entire application, he argues in a ZapThink white paper published this month titled, “SOA Quality across the Service Lifecycle”

“This core agility benefit of SOA collapses like a house of cards,” he writes, “if the services or the applications that consume and compose them are of poor quality or behave in an unpredictable manner.”

As Bloomberg sees it, most if not all of the benefits usually listed in support of the SOA approach are lost or at least compromised if quality management is not job one from initial planning through application lifecycle. Beyond agility the benefit of abstracting IT complexity is also jeopardized without a comprehensive quality assurance program. That program must go beyond the simpler task of testing individual Web services to include the quality assurance for the entire SOA application lifecycle, which includes the interactions of all services involved.

“Today’s enterprise IT environments are enormously complex, and it is that complexity more than any other cause that leads to the inflexibility that the business wishes to address,” Bloomberg writes. “And yet, SOA does not actually eliminate complexity–it abstracts the complexity, providing a flexible, simplified set of services to the business that overlays the unavoidable technical complexity. As with any abstraction, however, there is no magic here. To build such powerful services requires sophisticated governance, management, and an overall focus on quality.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Mindreef Releases SOAPscope Server 6.0 and Load Check

“SOA quality goes far beyond Web Services testing; Mindreef’s focus on the design-time, run-time, and change-time aspects of SOA Quality Management shows how well Mindreef delivers on what SOA teams need today,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink. “The new version of SOAPscope Server with Load Check underscores Mindreef’s leadership position in the industry with an expandable architecture to address SOA quality and performance issues today and in the future.”

Read more at: Mindreef Press Release

Mindreef, ZapThink offer SOA

Moving to a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) requires evolving practices and strategies in addition to the right set of tools and solutions, according to Mindreef and ZapThink, LLC. The companies have entered a partnership to combine ZapThink’s research advisory focused on building and maturing sustainable SOA practices with Mindreef’s SOAPscope SOA Quality solutions to help establish SOA in the enterprise.

The move to SOA requires new best practices and policies from a central architect group, together with the correct quality infrastructure that ensures policy compliance and fosters trust and quality for new services.

The three key areas of SOA Quality that will be focused in the combined offering include:

* Advisory and Implementation for Setting up SOA Councils / Centres of Excellence

* Advisory and Implementation of Design-time Governance

* Establishing Trust — An Elusive Element of SOA

Read more at: SDA India

Mindreef and ZapThink Offer SOA Quality Expertise and Strategies for Successfully Moving from Web Services to SOA

“Mindreef has pioneered the Web services and SOA market for nearly five years with proven products that address very specific requirements associated with Web services and SOA Quality,” adds Ron Schmeltzer, Senior Analyst at ZapThink. “We’re pleased to team with Mindreef to help companies successfully make the move from rolling out their Web services initiatives to properly implementing and fully realizing the benefits of SOA. The packaged advisory offering provided by ZapThink for Mindreef customers can help end-users make educated, impactful decisions for their business as part of an overall SOA Quality strategy.”

Read more at: Business Wire

SOA Report: Mindreef Teams With ZapThink

Mindreef Inc. and ZapThink LLC have combined forces to help companies with their SOA implementations. The partnership deal combines Mindreef’s SOAPscope Server and solutions with ZapThink’s integration advice. Part of the service involves providing SOA councils or a center of excellence to focus on fulfilling an enterprise’s business objectives. The companies also will provide design-time governance at the outset to build SOA applications with quality assurance. A third objective is to build trust among an enterprise’s departments to facilitate the reuse of services.

Read more at: Application Developmnent Trends

Mindreef Achieves Record Growth and Doubles Sales in 2006

“Industry watchers also recognize the huge potential in this market. Looking ahead to 2007, IT advisory and analysis firm ZapThink sees the SOA Quality and Testing market as the ‘next must-have space’ and that ‘demand for SOA quality and testing solutions will skyrocket in 2007,’ (see ZapThink’s ‘The SOA Forecast for 2007′ http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-200713).

Read more at: Mindreef Press Release

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.