JBoss Sets Sights on Open-Source SOA Supremacy with ESB

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, said, “Business Intelligence has an important role in process execution, and furthermore, as companies adopt SOA, we expect them to include BI in processes in much more flexible, business-focused ways.” And because SeeWhy offers both an enterprise edition and a community edition, he said, “It fits in with the model JBoss has.”

Read more at: eWeek

JBoss expands SOA product set with new ESB

ZapThink LLC analyst Ron Schmelzer noted that claims of who has the better ESB will be hard to verify.

“The ESB craze has entered the final phase with JBoss entering the fray,” he said. “The real problem is that despite all these vendors entering the market, there is even more confusion about what specific features an ESB must have. Does it provide messaging? How about service composition? What about a security framework or a governance runtime? Does the ESB provide a service container in a hub-and-spoke manner or as a distributed intermediary? Or how about as a managed endpoint, no stuff in the middle required?”

What this makes for in many cases, according to Schmelzer, is confused end users.

“I’m hoping that firms like JBoss can at some point reduce the noise factor by focusing on specific SOA infrastructure capabilities and not on playing the game of buzzword bingo,” he said.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

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.

Red Hat, JBoss could disrupt SOA disruption

Zapthink’s Bloomberg sees the deal as a potential win-win-win-win.

“From Red Hat’s perspective, they are now able to leverage JBoss’s efforts to put together a suite of open source SOA infrastructure products,” he said. “From JBoss’s perspective, they are now able to leverage their suite into Red Hat’s customer base. From the commercial vendors’ perspective, Red Hat/JBoss represents a more formidable open source alternative, pushing them to add value at increasingly higher levels. And from the customers’ perspective, the more they can get their open source selections from the same vendor, the lower their risk.”

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IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

Community Debates Microsoft’s Open-Source Agenda

Another possibility, suggested Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture) research house ZapThink, is that Microsoft is simply trying to get to know the open-source world better for its own purposes.

“I will hazard one response: in the words of Sun Tzu, ‘Know your enemy as you know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat,’” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: eWeek