Not a quick fix

You can’t buy SOA. You can buy tools that may help you get closer to an SOA, but there is no easy, one-off purchase that can make SOA a reality without a lot of work over time,” says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with ZapThink. “You have to start with baby steps, incrementally adapting to SOA and consistently proving the value to the business so it will continue to invest further in SOA.”

According to Schmelzer, a good first step is to take an inventory of proprietary middleware and application interfaces and replace them with standards-based systems and APIs. The goals are to eliminate the application-integration nightmare that haunts a majority of IT shops and to remove redundant components. Adapting the interfaces, with web services or other standards, will hasten the process of making application components work together.

And don’t discount legacy systems. “If you can prove you can make SOA happen on legacy apps, you will have an easier time proving it for new ones,” Schmelzer says.

Read more at: MIS

Big Companies Embracing Software Mashups

Experts say that although enterprise mashups promise to help make software development easier, they also present a new set of challenges. One of the key characteristics of enterprise mashups is that they put more power in the hands of end users. “The average I.T. establishment is reluctant to give users more power,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consulting firm ZapThink. The answer, he says, is for the I.T. department to provide oversight, defining what kinds of mashups are allowed, and then to govern that process. Software and service vendors can help companies implement management tools.

Read more at: CIO Today

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.

Reactivity Unveils Appliances For XML Networking

Ron Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said appliances to help the performance and security of XML data traffic has gained traction in the market since IBM’s acquisition last October of Datapower.

Reactivity has built “compelling” products for organizations that need a mechanism for automating the configuration of a system for different data types, Schmelzer said. While the company’s technology raises the bar for other vendors in the space, if demand continues to grow, then it’s likely other appliance vendors will follow suit, especially IBM. The latter company recently announced data handling capabilities in the Datapower XI50 appliance.

“So, (Reactvity) has interesting stuff that points at the continued evolution of the space, but nothing that can’t be easily reproduced by competitors if the market starts to demand that,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: CMP / VarBusiness

Infravio Embarks on European and US Event Circuit to Promote SOA Link Initiative and the Launch of X-Registry 6

Building on the debut of Infravio X-Registry(TM) Platform 6 and the SOA Link initiative, Infravio Inc., a leading provider of SOA technologies, embarked this month on a European and US event circuit to share its expertise and demonstrate its technological advances in SOA registry/repository and governance. Events include:

— ZapThink 4th SOA Practitioner’s Forum, Zurich, Switzerland, June 22, 2006 (www.zapthink.com/event.html?id=119)

– ZapThink 4th SOA Practitioner’s Forum, Frankfurt, Germany, June 23, 2006 (www.zapthink.com/event.html?id=120)

Read more at: Infravio Press Release

SOA vendors link up for interoperability

SOA Link and other recent developments are evidence that SOA is moving beyond the “hype” stage, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Zapthink, which sells research to SOA firms.

“SOA’s not hype. SOA and Web services are moving beyond the ‘connect things together’ stage. We’re at a point where it’s becoming a part of the mainstream,” Schmelzer said.

“That’s a bit less sexy, because you’re getting down to brass tacks: implementation details, not the big news stories,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

SOA Vendors Link For Interoperability

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer, whose research firm covers distributed computing, said it’s not particularly surprising that software powers are not there.

He said larger platform vendors will always push the fact that interoperability starts and ends with their platform primarily, and then secondarily to other products, while members of SOA Link know that other products, platforms, and infrastructure have to play in order for the group to prosper.

“This means that any SOA Link-implementing vendor acknowledges that they will interoperate with all other SOA Link vendors, including platform competitors,” Schmelzer said.

“It would be harder for the platform vendors to get a win by making such a claim. However, if customers start demanding this sort of vendor-neutral interoperability, then yes, at some point, these bigger fish will have to join the party.”

Read more at: InternetNews

SOA Metadata, Contracts & Policies

This presentation places the discussion of metadata, contracts, and policies into the context of continual business change. It discusses the definition of metadata, and explains how Service metadata are at the core of SOA. It then details Service contracts and policies, and defines governance and SOA governance.

This 20-slide presentatation was given on March 22, 2006 in a Webinar jointly sponsored by Infravio and Reactivity.

Infravio and Reactivity Sponsor Free Web Seminar — ”SOA Governance and Runtime Enforcement”