RIP Enterprise Software?

Today, in spite of a full decade of vendors paying lip service to the benefits of SOA. Customers are more than unhappy with enterprise software. They’re pissed. And they’re not going to take it any more.

هل هناك مستقبل للتطبيقات البرمجية المؤسسية

هل هناك مستقبل للتطبيقات البرمجية المؤسسية ترجمة: وائل الخواص – 7 ديسمبر 2009 يمكنك قراءة المقال من خلال هذا الرابط غالبا ما يتبادر الحديث ضمناً عن دور ومستقبل التطبيقات البرمجية المؤسسية عند الحديث عن البنية القائمة على الخدمات (SOA). ففى الواقع فإن زاب ثينك (ZapThink) تتحدث منذ …

Is there a Future for Enterprise Software?

The conversation about the role and future of enterprise software is a continuous undercurrent in the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) conversation. Indeed, ZapThink’s been talking about the future of enterprise software in one way or another for years. So, why bother bringing up this topic …

Evolution of the Rich Internet Application Market

As the Internet continues to penetrate every aspect of our lives, both business and personal, the distinction between “Internet application” and “application” increasingly fades from view. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) operate in the sweet spot among richness of Internet capability, richness of user interactivity, and richness of client-side computing capability. RIAs act as Service consumers as part of Service-Oriented Architecture implementations and enable Enterprise Mashups.

Since ZapThink first covered the space in 2002, the RIA market has matured considerably, establishing two core submarkets: RIA environments and RIA components. Adobe Systems emerging as a leader in the RIA environments submarket with their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and Flex products. Microsoft is a strong contender with their newer Silverlight technology. Open source vendors have emerged as significant players, and form a large portion of the RIA components submarket.

While the RIA market should continue to grow for the next few years, it will most likely merge with other markets long term and be indifferentiable from a market sizing perspective as the RIA category increasingly overlaps with other existing desktop and Internet application categories.

Filling Holes in the SOA Stack with Runtime Governance

ZapThink considers runtime SOA governance a requirement of successful SOA, greatly increasing the chances that the SOA implementation will have business value. Indeed, the lack of adequate runtime SOA governance greatly reduces the chances of success. The ability to create and monitor policies, manage performance, secure the system, and provide self-healing mechanisms means the SOA implementation will provide ongoing value through productivity benefits.

However, most SOA stack vendors do not address many of the key requirements of SOA, including solution patterns around runtime SOA goverance. Considering this limitation, it’s important to address these issues with the proper technology, leveraged in the proper way. Thus, the purpose of this paper.

SOA Consortium Presents: SOA Governance Roundtable Podcast

The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000 successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Founding sponsors are BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, and SAP AG. Participants in the consortium to date include: Aberdeen Group, Adaptive, Inc, American Red Cross, Avis Budget Car Rental, Bank of America, Capability Measurement, Cape Clear Software, Inc., CellExchange, Inc., Center for Public-Private Enterprise, CGI, CSC, EDS, Equally Keen, Ltd., Federal Signal Corp., General Services Administration, Helm Solutions Group, HP, Hurwitz & Associates, Interoperability Clearinghouse, Integration Consortium, iWay Software, Kohl’s Department Stores, Lake Trail Partners, LLC, MAKE Technologies Inc., Maryfran Johnson & Associates, Object Management Group, Penn National Insurance, SAIC, PHS Operation, SDG Corporation, Sonoa Systems, TethersEnd Consulting, Thomas & Hebert, Torry Harris Business Solutions, WebEx Communications, Wells Fargo Bank, and ZapThink, LLC. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by the Object Management Group.

Read more at: Business Wire

Oracle: SOA to Fuse Financial Services Package

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink in Baltimore, said this standardized approach to exposing functionality and the use of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) as a way of defining a process composition could help customers, but warned that AIA is still a work in progress.

“These are basically pre-packaged integrations. [Oracle] is saying, ‘let’s define some composition of functionality across products and push them out,’” said Schmelzer. “In practice, I don’t know if we’ve seen companies take this approach and use it for integration. The test is how well they can take existing applications, put something on top, and integrate.

Schmelzer added that the biggest thing Oracle has to deal with is that their own products aren’t integrated.

“If they are trying to sell integration architectural approaches to customers, they really have to prove they can do this for their own customers,” he said.

Read more at: eWeek

More heated debate on Service Component Architecture – is it vendor lock-in?

Another reader, Rtenhove, took issue with ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg’s assertions that SCA’s value is marginal to SOA. “At its core, SCA has some valuable concepts about how to design composite applications using SOA. Bloomberg’s assertions about SCA and JBI being of “marginal” help don’t stand up to inspection. As for JBI: Bloomberg attempts to cast it as in conflict with SCA. That is nonsense. JBI is about run-time; SCA is about design-time.”

Read more at: ZDNet Blogs

Oracle vs. SAP: The SOA factor

IT professionals planning for SOA should begin by putting down their pocketbooks and taking the time to determine exactly what business problems they want SOA to solve, according to analysts.

“You start with the business problems, you look at your business processes, you figure out how to build services and then you start thinking about what to buy,” aid Jason Bloomberg, a senior SOA and Web services analyst with Baltimore-based ZapThink LLC. “[Buying is] not the first step, it’s the fourth or fifth step.”

Also, Bloomberg said, database management systems are key components of the SOA infrastructure, so it’s important to use a DBMS that supports XML natively. Most DBMSs support XML reasonably well, he said, but it’s a good idea for organizations to do product comparison to determine if they have the right skills in-house to make the most of the specific XML features found in each product.

“Do not expect to buy SOA from any [one] vendor,” Bloomberg said. “[SOA is] an approach that leverages heterogeneity, so if any vendor says, ‘buy my stuff a you’ll get a SOA in a box,’ they’re pulling the wool over your eyes. No vendor can say that truthfully.”

“SAP has had the edge [over Oracle] because they have a more solid enterprise services story. They’re talking about services that are abstractions of their application functionality — their core ERP and CRM capabilities,” Bloomberg said. “But with Oracle, you have their SOA story, and you have their enterprise applications story, and you don’t see them connected as well as SAP’s.”

And then there’s Big Blue.

“IBM has the broadest and deepest SOA story of any vendor, with their solid software and professional services offerings as well as the depth of each across product lines and verticals,” Bloomberg said. “They’re everyone’s number one competitor.”

Read more at: SearchOracle

Service Component Architecture gets slapped around a bit

Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink also recently had some unkind words about SCA. He also uses the occasion to take a swipe a JBI (Java Business Integration), noting that both that SCA and JBI are mostly about vendor politics and hype and should be ignored by SOA architects and developers.

SCA is intended to provide a model for the assembly of composite application development, which forms the basis of most SOA deployments. These composite applications may be based on collections of individual services. SCA is designed to address the need for control over access and security, and simplify the development of business services and Service Data Objects (SDO) for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats.

Read more at: ZDNet Blogs