The Future of SOA

ZapForum Podcast for October 12, 2009: The Future of SOA: Does the Cloud Have a SOA Lining?

With guest experts

Jason Armstrong, Practice Manager for Strategic Solutions, Summa Techologies

Ed Horst, Chief Marketing Officer, AmberPoint

Brad Wright, Data Services Product Manger, Progress DataDirect

JP Morgenthal, Senior Principal Architect, QinetiQ

David Linthicum, Author, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide

James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research.

Legacy, Data, and the Cloud

Presentation for Practical SOA event, October 2009, sponsored by DataDirect.

How the concept of the Service abstraction unifies the issues of legacy, data, and Cloud Computing.

35-slide PowerPoint in pdf format.

Progress Software Names New CEO

Overall, Progress “has quite a few good assets in the SOA and integration markets,” said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer via e-mail. “However, they are in many ways a second-tier vendor competing against the much more entrenched incumbents: IBM, Oracle, Software AG, HP and Microsoft.”

Market consolidation, such as Oracle’s purchase of BEA, has further cemented the position of the incumbents, Schmelzer added.

But this in turn “makes Progress continue to be a good second choice when end-users aren’t first considering their existing incumbent vendors,” he said. “Without Progress itself getting acquired by one of the ‘big guys,’ I don’t see how this dynamic will change.”

Read more at: PC World

Progress puts its Mindreef assets to work on SOA

“Combining quality and management capabilities makes a lot of sense. Governance quality and management all fit closely together,” said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg. “For the Actional tool to be competitive with the likes of [Hewlett-Packard], it makes sense to include quality.”

He noted that Progress Software is a long-term partner of HP and that Actional often works in conjunction with the Systinet registry/repository.

Read more at: SD Times

Panel: How to sell SOA governance to a skeptical audience

Everybody wants governance, but nobody wants to be governed.

That statement by Ron Schmelzer sums up the conundrum faced by SOA advocates: governance is desperately needed to keep SOA projects on track and in focus. What happens, though, is SOA governance gets weakened and watered down by vested interests, or lack of motivation to make SOA work.

I recently had the opportunity to moderate an ebizQ panel on the topic of SOA governance, which genarated a lot of discussion on the challenges of selling governance to a skeptical audience that may not want to be governed. The panel consisted of a stellar line-up of industry experts including Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director with Burton Group; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner with ZapThink; David Bressler, SOA evangelist for the Actional products at Progress Software; Ed Horst, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AmberPoint; Frank Martinez, senior vice president, product strategy for SOA Software; and John Michelson, a founder and chief scientist of iTKO LISA. (Archived audio replay available here.)

Read more at: ZDNet

Experts to Hash out SOA Governance Best Practices at ebizQ’s Virtual Conference

ebizQ.net (http://www.ebizq.net), the Insider’s Guide to Business and IT Agility, today announced that six of the industry’s leading experts will participate in a panel discussion on SOA Governance and IT Governance during its September 24th SOA Governance virtual conference. The expert panelists include Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group, Jason Bloomberg of Zapthink, Frank Martinez of SOA Software, Dan Foody of Progress Software, John Michelsen of iTKO and Ed Horst of Amberpoint. The panel will be moderated by leading independent SOA analyst and ZDNet contributor, Joe McKendrick.

Read more at: eBizQ

Tibco Beefs up Business Events Processing Wares

Pretty much any of the established companies in the CEP space are worth a look, said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink.

But it’s often tough to say whether one company’s product is truly faster or more scalable than another without knowing, for example, what kind of events are being processed, he added: “Are they all inside a network? Are they distributed far and wide? It it one proprietary system, or spread across a heterogeneous environment?”

Read more at: PCWorld

ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap 3.0

Download or purchase ZapThink’s popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster!

ZapThink Announces Major Update to Popular SOA Implementation Roadmap Poster

ZapThink, the industry’s foremost experts, advisers, and educators in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture, is responding to customer demand with today’s publication of the third version of its popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster. The company distributed over 100,000 copies of its first two versions of the poster, the first in 2003 and then updated in 2005. The latest version adds cutting-edge thought leadership in SOA, includes detail on architectural artifacts, and expands coverage of SOA Quality, Enterprise Mashups, and more.

Read more at: Emediawire

Progress makes another SOA buy

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with the SOA consultancy ZapThink, called the deal “a huge, positive move for Progress” via e-mail.

“Not only does it bolster their ability to deliver high-quality SOA, but it also helps to reinforce the message that SOA is not just about Web services integration and ESBs [enterprise service buses],” he wrote. “SOA is about changing the way we think of and consume IT capabilities, and to do so in an environment of high quality requires a robust platform.”

ZapThink expects other SOA platform vendors to move in the direction of quality testing, perhaps through acquisitions of companies like as iTKO, he added.

Read more at: NetworkWorld