Is Middleware or Poor Planning the Problem?

Middleware is supposed to solve integration problems, but some say its proliferation may cause more integration problems than it solves. For instance, in November, ZapThink wrote a piece arguing that one reason SOA hasn’t cut integration costs is because companies are using too much middleware.

Read more at: IT Business Edge

Is open source remaking the ESB market?

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, said both pure play vendors suffered from a failure to gain traction for their ESB in the SOA marketplace.

“Iona and Cape Clear are clearly examples of a broader consolidation trend in the industry,” he said, “but in their particular cases, it’s more examples of better technology that both vendors were unable to market and sell effectively enough to grow their business sufficiently.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

JBoss Projects Form Red Hat SOA Stack

However, at least one analyst isn’t impressed. Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink, called the SOA platform “new labels on old stuff.”

He added that JBoss middleware has been “setting the bar for all the [competing] commercial products. All the commercial products have to be better than JBoss,” said Bloomberg, because the value proposition of these open-source projects is high enough to make them reasonable alternatives to expensive commercial solutions.

Read more at: SD Times

Two Ways To Deal With SOA’s Data Integration Challenge

“SOA starts to blur the difference between data and applications,” says Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, an SOA market research firm. When a set of applications performs some function, isolated as an independent service, the results can look a lot like data as they’re passed off to another application. Likewise, a query to a service that triggers a stored procedure in the database yields results that look a lot like an outcome of application logic. In services, data ceases to exist as something distinct from the application logic.

Not everyone is a fan of the iWay approach to integrating data across services. “I have always been somewhat skeptical,” says ZapThink’s Schmelzer, because it is too close to the old application-to-application integration of yesteryear, where each connection has to be set up individually and is inflexible.

Services need to be architected so that they yield data that can be consumed by various applications, although iWay’s Service Manager manages much of that task. Companies also need to be able to change how data is presented without altering the service interface. IWay, however, often requires an interface for each presentation rather than producing data that can be easily used across all of them, Schmelzer says.

Read more at: InformationWeek

Red Hat Enters Matrix On a Quest for SOA

But Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, thinks that Red Hat still has some building to do. “I would say there are other open source plays out there. There’s open source ESBs, and Iona bought LogicBlaze, but it’s not really about competing with those guys,” he said. “It’s about competing with commercial plays. It is a value-add. The key question is, how compelling it is? Red Hat’s overall challenge is that they don’t really have an overall SOA story.”

Read more at: SD Times

WS-Federation going to Oasis after all

While the headlines imply that vendors are in hot pursuit of customers, in actuality, this is an argument of the future, rather than the present, said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer in an email response. “End users are still grappling with the basics of getting enterprise identity management to work in a composite environment. It remains to be seen what long-term uptake customers will have with WS-Federation specific products and offerings.”

Read more at: Computer Business Review

The incredible shrinking SOA vendors

“The space is much smaller than it used to be,” observed Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. He added it’s likely to get smaller than it now. “This industry is consolidating very fast. We may find by the end of 2007 another two or three big deals.”

It’s possible that major players including Oracle Corp. and HP will be looking to fill out their SOA product lines. Schmelzer sees the management products of AmberPoint Inc. and the testing products of Mindreef Inc. as potential targets for Oracle. Those two, plus testing vendors Parasoft Corp. and iTKO Inc. might be on HP’s wishlist. As evidenced by the webMethods deal, even larger SOA vendors are not immune. “Who knows,” Schmelzer speculates, “maybe Oracle will pick up Tibco.”

Getting to the bottom line he says, “It’s looking less and less likely that strong independent companies will stay independent.”

The end of this year might also look a little like “Back to the Future” in Schmelzer’s view.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

JBOSS Building a Hybrid Stack?

I found it surprising that IONA wasn’t mentioned in this article over at Application Development Trends in which Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink refers to LogicBlaze and WSO2 as \”running circles\” around RedHat. IONA has more expertise in distributed SOA infrastructure than any of the vendors mentioned. IONA offers a distributed, holistic solution, including the best open source technologies for services creation and communication between distributed endpoints that interoperate with the best proprietary technologies for things like high availability, security framework integration, and sophisticated registry/repository capability. IONA isn’t trying to build an integrated stack, but rather to enable lightweight, distributed SOA that is flexible and cost effective. IONA recently added the new Artix Registry/Repository product to solve the challenging problem of managing truly distributed services. Chris Horn has an interesting analogy between governing SOA and governing a nation over at his blog (you should definitely check out his blog if you haven\’t already).

Read more at: Linux World

SOA Software and Red Hat Partner To Support Web Services on JBoss

From SOA Software’s perspective, there’s little downside to this deal, observed ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg, because working with open-source middleware provides the company with a reference implementation for its customers who lack sufficient commercial middleware.

“But the real subtext here is that the Red Hat/JBoss combo has been a very weak player in the open-source SOA marketplace,” Bloomberg added. “So from their perspective, a partnership with SOA Software might help them get a leg up. However, partnering with a commercial software vendor is a risky move, because it dilutes the open-source value proposition.”

Read more at: ADT Magazine

IBM, Red Hat build SOA virtualization into Unix/Linux servers

Virtualization may be in SOA’s future, but it remains a tricky sell, partially because in IT organizations the SOA experts and the virtualization experts inhabit two separate worlds, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for ZapThink LLC.

“Even though SOA is a type of virtualization, application virtualization, if you will, the worlds of SOA and processor virtualization like IBM’s POWER Virtualization have largely been separate concerns in the enterprise,” the analyst explained. “Our discussions with enterprise architects have indicated that the problem is that conversations about SOA and virtualization require different skill sets and appear in separate areas of concern, so it’s rare that the two efforts are well-coordinated.”

Regardless of its potential value, virtualization for SOA will require a strong marketing story, Bloomberg said.

“There’s no question that highly scalable, reliable, cost-effective SOA implementations could clearly benefit from well-planned virtualization strategies,” he said. “IBM sees this need, and is well positioned to fill it. The challenge they will have, however, is in identifying the right customer contacts who can put the SOA and virtualization stories together effectively.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices