A Roadmap for SOA Success

Presentation on the core challenges of SOA, with some practical advice on how to overcome those challenges. Included is a discussion of building the business case, finding funding, enabling the architects, building a team, and enabling reuse.

Presented in Toronto, ON, Canada on June 21, 2007 at an event co-sponsored by Progress/Sonic and Online Business Systems.

ZapForum Podcast: Semantic Integration & SOA

ZapForum Podcast for May 21, 2007 features

Guest Experts Ken Rugg, Vice President Products, DataXtend, Progress Software.

and Bradley Falk, Chief Architect, Western Region, Online Business Systems.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Define semantic integration, semantic models, and ontologies
• Understand the relationship between semantic integration and SOA
• Learn about the limitations of semantic integration

Online Business Systems: SOA For Justice & Public Safety

Online Business Systems (Online) is a midsize professional services firm that has built a business for over twenty years by focusing on aligning business needs with integration-centric IT solutions. Now, they are leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices as well to add a new level of agility to their integration offering for many different industries.

In particular, Online has been able to leverage SOA best practices within their Integrated Justice & Public Safety practice, which serves public responders, courts, and other parts of the justice system. These clients have particularly stringent integration requirements, due to the dynamic nature of law enforcement, the requirement for high levels of security and confidentiality, and the diverse, heterogeneous set of agencies who must work together. Online’s SOA capabilities, combined with their integration skills and business focus have enabled them to build many successful implementations in the justice and public safety arena.

Leading SOA Advisors ZapThink Strike up Partnership with Business/IT Consulting Company Online Business Systems

ZapThink and Online Business Systems have joined forces to assist companies that aspire to transform themselves into agile businesses.

Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink’s senior analysts and authors of the bestselling book “Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation will Change Your Business,” are at the forefront of the Service Orientation movement. They have been evangelizing their vision and strategy for approaching and implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) within organizations for six years. To help them handle the demand for their strategic SOA services, Bloomberg and Schmelzer launched the Licensed ZapThink Partner (LZP) program with Online Business Systems invited a charter member.

“To deliver on our vision we were looking for like-minded partners that not only shared our beliefs and enthusiasm for Service Orientation but also had the experience implementing it within organizations,” says Schmelzer. “Online has developed a successful track record of SOA implementations by leveraging its decades worth of experience with complex, multi-platform enterprise integration work.”

“Just because companies are implementing SOA doesn’t mean they’re implementing it in the most effective way,” says Bloomberg. “ZapThink collects the most effective, highest quality approaches to doing SOA and compiles them in such a way that emerging leaders of the SOA movement can leverage them for their own success. Our LZPs are the only credentialed firms qualified to deliver high-quality SOA leveraging these approaches and best practices. Whether a company needs guidance on developing their SOA implementation strategy, defining their SOA scope, building their business case for SOA, or developing their SOA organizational and architectural change management strategy, our Master Architects have the experience to help.”

“ZapThink shows true thought leadership in understanding Service Orientation,” says Tim Siemens, Online’s Chief Technology Officer. “As a business and technology consulting company, our clients depend on us to stay at the forefront of the changes in technology. With several of our senior architects now credentialed by ZapThink as Master Architects, we are in a better position than ever to deliver high-quality SOA strategy and implementation to our clients.”

Read more at: ZapThink and OBS Press Release

SOA Advisor ZapThink Partners with Online Business Systems

ZapThink and Online Business Systems have partnered in an effort to assist companies that want to transform themselves into agile businesses. Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer, senior analysts at ZapThink, have launched the Licensed ZapThink Partner (LZP) program with Online Business Systems invited as a charter member.

“To deliver on our vision we were looking for like-minded partners that not only shared our beliefs and enthusiasm for Service Orientation but also had the experience implementing it within organizations,” says Schmelzer. “Online has developed a successful track record of SOA implementations by leveraging its decades worth of experience with complex, multi-platform enterprise integration work.”

“Just because companies are implementing SOA doesn’t mean they’re implementing it in the most effective way,” says Bloomberg. “ZapThink collects the most effective, highest quality approaches to doing SOA and compiles them in such a way that emerging leaders of the SOA movement can leverage them for their own success. Our LZPs are the only credentialed firms qualified to deliver high-quality SOA leveraging these approaches and best practices. Whether a company needs guidance on developing their SOA implementation strategy, defining their SOA scope, building their business case for SOA, or developing their SOA organizational and architectural change management strategy, our Master Architects have the experience to help.”

“ZapThink shows true thought leadership in understanding Service Orientation,” says Tim Siemens, Online’s Chief Technology Officer. “As a business and technology consulting company, our clients depend on us to stay at the forefront of the changes in technology. With several of our senior architects now credentialed by ZapThink as Master Architects, we are in a better position than ever to deliver high-quality SOA strategy and implementation to our clients.”

Online and ZapThink have put their partnership into action by delivering a SOA strategy course to the Communication and Information Wing at Scott Air Force base in Illinois, as well as a number of joint-training sessions offered through the Intervista Institute. “These courses are truly unique, since they cover both the academic vision AND actual lessons learned from the trenches, and are presented by Enterprise Architects with real world implementation experience,” says Murray Laatsch, Integration Director for Online and ZapThink Master Architect. “Many of our clients are looking for logical next steps in raising their corporate SOA maturity and these educational and informative sessions offer that.”

Read more at: Jax Magazin

SOA Consulting Expert Roundtable

ZapThink’s ZapForum Podcast for September 14,2006 features

Guest Experts: Ken Dschankilic, Director, Eastern Region Integration Practice, Online Business Systems; Dr. Udaya Bhaskar Vemulapati, General Manager, Enterprise Architecture and Consulting Practice, Wipro Technologies; and Peter Graef, Partner,
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Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Get a clear picture of the pros and cons of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to SOA
• Understand how to build the right Services at the right level of granularity
• Learn about the relationship between IT governance and SOA governance, as well as the cultural aspects of governance
• Understand why some organizations believe that they should buy a product to implement SOA, and why that’s not generally a good approach

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.

A Roadmap to SOA Success

This 78-slide presentation covers:

• The business impact of SOA and why you should care

• SOA Roadmap: The lowest risk path to SOA
• Solutions for tactical issues faced when implementing SOA

Presentation given in Calgary, AL on September 29, 2005.

Using SOA to Drive Corporate Governance & Compliance Initiatives

Presentation on governance and compliance for Online Business Systems.

IT governance is the most critical area of corporate governance in today’s competitive enterprise.

SOA is an approach to enterprise architecture that abstracts IT functionality into business-oriented Services. The application of SOA to IT governance — what we call SOA governance — promises …