От создателей SOA-приложений

«Мы уже прошли тот этап, когда компании могли себе позволить роскошь решать, поддерживать или не поддерживать SOA, – заметил аналитик компании ZapThink Рон Шмелцер. – Совершенно очевидно, что в данном направлении будут двигаться все эти производители».

Read more at: OSP.RU (Russian)

Vendors release SOA programming model

“We’re past the point of companies being able to have the luxury of deciding whether or not to do an SOA,” says ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. “It’s very clear that’s the direction all of those vendors are going.”

Read more at: ComputerWorld New Zealand

Top vendors team up over SOA

“We’re past the point of companies being able to have the luxury of deciding whether or not to do an SOA,” said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. “It’s very clear that’s the direction all of those vendors are going.”

Read more at: Techworld

SOA – spawning a services market

“The dirty little secret of SOA is that it doesn’t require buying a lot of new software. SOA is architecture, and SOA is hard. It’s not a one-off software project,” says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with ZapThink.

According to ZapThink, 80% of money spent today on SOA initiatives is for professional services, not software, and Schmelzer says, “Spending should continue to go in that direction.” Unlike with software purchases, services spending is expected and almost required with SOA, because development requires less new code and more reworking of existing applications. Yet when it comes to buying SOA services, IT managers have to be sure they are investing in SOA and process expertise and not paying the vendor to get its software up and running. The challenge for IT managers will be to determine which vendors have the lion’s share of expertise when it comes to designing architecture and establishing processes to support an SOA going forward.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Tier1 Innovation: Building Dynamic Systems with SOA

Tier1 Innovation is a midsize IT professional services firm who is building an SOA practice on top of a successful Siebel implementation practice. Their SOA approach is iterative: they help companies understand and plan SOA while they implement pilot projects that take advantage of their clients’ existing IT infrastructure–an approach that helps them build trust among their clients.

Tier1 offers a remarkably innovative approach to building and implementing SOA. Rather than simply considering Services to be thin veneers over traditional, tightly-coupled systems, Tier1 sees SOA as an overarching approach toward building highly dynamic systems that companies can quickly reconfigure using metadata and events–a flexible approach to SOA ZapThink calls just-in-time integration.

Accenture: SOA as Strategic Architecture for Improving Business Performance

Professional services firm Accenture’s core mission is to improve the business performance of its clients. Accenture accomplishes this mission through a combination of business process expertise and technical consulting. Accenture’s technology roadmap offers their clients an approach to building information technology solutions and approaches that will meet the goal of business performance improvement.

Accenture believes that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will underpin this technology roadmap. They believe SOA will be the single dominant technical architecture in the future, driven primarily by the need for interoperability. As a result, they are recommending and implementing SOA-based approaches for improving the business of clients worldwide.

What You Need to Know About Service-Oriented Architecture

SOAs make it easier to integrate the “everything but the kitchen sink” IT environments found in most companies. “That’s the big value of an SOA; it works very well in heterogeneous environments,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, a Web services consultancy. Developers don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time writing new lines of code to connect applications. Instead, they can use standard protocols, such as Web services. And large chunks of SOA code are reusable, reducing development costs. An SOA takes your legacy investments–your SAP, Siebel, Oracle and the like–and makes them all play nicely (and more cheaply) together.

Read more at: CIO Magazine

ZapThink: Client-side Web Technologies Inadequate to Meet Evolving Needs of Web Services

ZapThink: Client-side Web Technologies Inadequate to Meet Evolving Needs of Web Services
New Class of Rich and Smart Clients Evolving to Solve Next-Generation Computing Needs

WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 3, 2004–The Internet and Web have provided immense scalability and manageability benefits to computer users for a decade now, but at a price – poor support for rich interactivity. Now, companies are increasingly demanding a rich set user experience capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications. ZapThink concludes in its report entitled “Rich and Smart Clients for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs)” that today’s Web technologies are wholly inadequate to meet the needs of emerging standards-based, loosely coupled, distributed applications.

“Simply put, today’s corporate portals must move beyond Web-based thin client technologies,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “Rather, companies must leverage the power of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures to offer rich clients that provide deep interactivity, yet retain the scalability and manageability benefits that browsers provide.”

ZapThink’s report analyzes a new class of rich client vendor offering and several approaches to providing rich clients that in part rely upon SOAs to provide the optimal combination of rich user interaction and low cost of ownership through standards-based distributed computing. The report identifies the windows of opportunities as well as market growth predictions for new entrants and incumbent vendors.

Other key findings of the report include:

• Rich clients will supplant portals as the primary interface to Web Services and Service-oriented functionality in the enterprise by the end of 2007.
• The total opportunity for rich clients for SOAs is over $923 million by 2010.
• The window of opportunity for new entrants in the rich client market will start to wane with the release of the Microsoft Longhorn update of windows in the 2006-2007 timeframe.
• The increasing adoption of sometimes-connected devices, mobile computing, asynchronous computing, and e-Forms will mandate widespread and rapid adoption of rich clients.

The report, available on ZapThink’s website at www.zapthink.com, discusses several companies, including Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Altio, Apple, AT&T, Citrix, Curl, Cysive, DreamFactory, FileMaker, Focus Solutions, General Interface, Harmonia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, JackBe, Kinitos, Laszlo Systems, Lucent, Macromedia (NASDAQ: MACR), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Motorola, Mozilla, Nexaweb, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), Oracle, Plumtree, RatchetSoft, SAP, SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX), Siebel, Softricity, TiVo, Vignette, and Vultus.

Read more at: ZapThink Press Release

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Waning EAI Market Turns to Project-Based Integration

Conversely, one research firm believes service-oriented processes may some day sound the death knell for EAI. ZapThink published their results in a study this past April.

“If you’re thinking of it from the bottom-up as a bunch of systems that you’re trying to integrate, you’re going to need a bunch of expensive systems to make it happen,” said ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer. “By approaching a Service-Oriented Architecture from a business process perspective, it will buy you all of the things people are trying to solve with integration products today.”

Read more at: Internetnews.com