HP Blasts Off With Mercury

“SOA is all about business technology optimization, and the combination of the OpenView product line with Mercury BTO heralds a new era of full-lifecycle IT management for organizations as they progress down their SOA roadmaps,” said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg.

Read more at: InternetNews

Testing & QA in the Web Services World

Jason Bloomberg of Zapthink adds, “The silo problem is more complex than just operational security people on one hand and developers and QA on the other. The way people are approaching security is changing. You can no longer rely on a barrier-type metaphor – inside trusted, outside not trusted. That approach no longer works. The traditional barrier approach operates on the OSI stack, and that’s entirely inadequate for dealing with SOA security. XML can come in, but it’s just text. The traditional firewalls just don’t know what’s inside the message. The security issue impacts content-aware networking – message assembly, encryption, decryption, forwarding, etc. – that is part of the SOA architecture.” And all of that needs to be tested.

Zapthink’s Bloomberg observes that adoption of Web services and service-oriented architectures has taken longer than expected. In his view, customers are still struggling with testing in SOA environments. “If all you’re thinking about is Web services themselves (standards-based interfaces) – you send it test data, load-test it, etc. – that’s a no-brainer and involves traditional testing disciplines. But when you talk about SOAs, that’s something altogether different.” Back in 2002 Bloomberg and Zapthink developed a timeline outlining their expectations for what would be required. (See the updated version of the timeline, reflecting slower-than-anticipated adoption rates.)

Bloomberg notes that governance has two sides. “If you have an SOA, you want to handle governance in a service-oriented fashion, but you have to build the right governance policies as well.” Governance has an IT operational perspective as well as a business perspective.

Read more at: Software Magazine

Componentization Big for Big Blue in 2005

“Componentization is a very interesting thing for IBM; it cuts across the software products and there’s an enormous effort to come up with the logical components and make the building blocks,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink, a Waltham, Mass.-based research firm. “One interesting thing is that some components that have been associated with one brand are now associated with another brand. For example, the portal is identified with Lotus, but it’s part of the WebSphere brand. The same is true with DB2 Integrator, which has been named WebSphere Integrator. It includes mostly DB2 technology under the covers.”

Read more at: e-Pro Magazine

IBM Takes On Microsoft Over Modeling Tools

“UML continues to have a steep learning curve, making it most appropriate for seasoned architects and senior developers. While UML 2.0 is far more complete than earlier versions, it is still not possible to completely define software functionality in UML,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass. “In contrast, Microsoft’s approach in Visual Studio has always been an inclusive one–create a tool easy enough to use for the beginner yet powerful enough for the power developer.”

Read more at: eWeek

Corel Sheds XML Business

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said the offloading makes sense given the heavy competition, as IBM/Rational, (Quote, Chart) Borland, (Quote, Chart) Sybase, (Quote, Chart) Sun, (Quote, Chart) and Microsoft are building full XML capabilities, narrowing the opportunity for stand-alone XML tools.

“Corel has long been strong on the desktop, but their eminence on the server-side has never really been shown,” said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer. “Their entry into XML and Web Services market clearly is coming to an end, from an independent product perspective, with the sale of the XMetal product and the absorption of Smart Graphics into the rest of their product line (they’re no longer selling this product separately). With Corel exiting the market, it looks as though the only contenders selling XML and Web Services products for enabling desktop productivity are Microsoft and Adobe…”

Read more at: InternetNews

Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM

Rational, along with such companies as Microsoft and Borland, is looking to facilitate SOA development with its tools. XML and Web services research firm ZapThink recently estimated SOA-based products would top $43 billion by 2010.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

IBM’s Rational buyout starts to bear fruit

The fact that Rational was an IBM business partner before the acquisition and, like IBM, was focused on large enterprise customers made the transition fairly straightforward, says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “It doesn’t strike me as being nearly as much of a culture difference as Tivoli or Lotus were when they were acquired,” he says.

Read more at: NetworkWorldFusion

Borland advances ALM goals

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, questioned whether platform independence is a boon to developers in the grand scheme of ALM.

“To have a separate development platform and a separate portal platform … is becoming less and less attractive to developers,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

.NET Rewarding Developers

Meanwhile, the Whidbey version of Visual Studio .NET features a raft of enhancements (including security, administration, and performance tweaks) with a common bottom line: attractiveness to the developer community, according to Bloomberg. “In the early days of VB.NET, it was an object-oriented version and there was a risk Microsoft would lose developers because object-oriented programming is more of a challenge,” he says. He believes that the new Visual Studio .NET is not only easy to use but also has something to offer to “senior developers who want to get into C Sharp as well as Visual C++.”

Read more at: Line56

The role of the service-oriented architect

Article by Jason Bloomberg: Web services have moved beyond the hype stage and are now a reality for many enterprises. Hundreds of companies have built Web services pilot projects, proving that this most recent evolution of distributed computing technology can reduce integration and development costs substantially. Forward-looking enterprises are now looking to take the next step and leverage the power of Web services strategically across the enterprise.

Read more at: Rational Edge