Leveraging SOA for Agile Business Processes

Enterprises around the world are facing a momentous transformation, as they move away from traditional, inflexible approaches to leveraging information technology (IT) resources to a more agile way that helps to improve business process. This transition from an aggegration-centric view of technology that leads to brittle assemblages of heterogeneous assets to the composition-centric view that positions IT resources as flexible services that the business can compose together to support and manage flexible processes heralds a new era of value to organizations. Underpinning this transition is the move to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which provides best practices for organizing IT resources to enable organizations to better leverage business change.

More on the SOA Governance Thing

I had a few good responses to my blog post on SOA Governance.

The purpose of the post was to define the patterns found in SOA Governance tools, and it is indeed okay to define those patterns. Not sure it’s “dangerous,” just adds clarity for those looking at these tools. In essence, that was the purpose of the post. I should have been clearer about that.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Software AG Strengthens SOA Security with Layer 7 Partnership

“SOA governance presents a complex set of challenges, because it involves policy creation, communication, management, and enforcement across the Service lifecycle,” said Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner at ZapThink. “The combination of CentraSite and Layer 7 Technologies’ SecureSpan security and policy enforcement capabilities provides enterprises with a comprehensive governance and security solution that covers the gamut from policy definition through enforcement.”

Read more at: SOA World Magazine

Could uncertain times be a boon for SOA?

ZapThink’s Dave Linthicum says that SOA, properly implemented, delivers a very high return on investment – something that will help businesses in uncertain times.

Read more at: ZDNet

European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

I’m in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink’s Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I’ll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories.

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We’ve posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term “SOA” can polarize some IT teams – it’s an “either/or” decision at the architectural level.

Read more at: SOA World

Tales of Two Cities

The most vocal response came from colleague and partner-in-crime Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, who wrote us from Germany. While meeting with Software AG at their Darmstadt headquarters, he learned that the brunt of the company’s SOA business is now coming from Europe, not the states. “Flatly put, the US is under-investing in architecture and over-invested in infrastructural glue. The wheels are coming off the car, and we think we’re moving in the right direction?” Schmelzer wrote. Reflecting this, Schmelzer notes that attendance at ZapThink’s Practical SOA architect training sessions is definitely running stronger in Europe.

Obviously, Schmelzer has some mercenary concerns — he’d like to see US attendance at Zap’s seminars as healthy as Europe. But he points to a deeper concern that weak enterprise architecture skills could in the long run jeopardize competitiveness, as Europeans use SOA to support increased enterprise agility.

Read more at: On Strategies

Opportunity Knocks, SOA Consultants Answer

Last year, ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer sounded warning bells about a looming enterprise architect “drought” which could derail many SOA efforts. He noted that there “is a significant demand in the marketplace for experienced SOA talent,” and “a burgeoning of SOA consulting companies that offer kick-start approaches to SOA in which they supply the experienced architects and their customers supply the heavy-lift labor to implement the services.”

Read more at: SOA in Action Blog

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Frankfurt Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 8, 2008 features:

Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Ingo Arnold, Enterprise Systems Architect, Novartis Pharma AG

Wolfgang Otto, Principal Systems Engineer, BEA Systems

Florian Mösch, Vice President Enterprise Integration & Architecture, T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH

Jason English, iTKO, iTKO

Dr. Waldemar Lohrer, Senior Berater, Swiss Life

Tim Hall, SOA Center Product Management, Hewlett-Packard

Lars Drexler, VP Sales Enablement, Software AG

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA event in Frankfurt, Germany, on January 15, 2008.

SOA 2008: The year of the guerrilla

While vendors, who offered many predictions for 2008, tend to be optimists, the assessment that an economic downturn this year might alter SOA adoption patterns was offered by analyst Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink LLC. His very first prediction for 2008 “takes into account the current economic slowdown.”

Since ZapThink is not in the economic forecasting business, Bloomberg did not try to predict how deep or long the slowdown might be, but he offered an assessment of how it might impact SOA.

“It would be easy to simply say that tightening IT purse strings will lead to cancellations or at least postponements of SOA initiatives, but we don’t see that happening as a universal pattern,” he wrote. “Instead, we see a slowdown separating enterprises into two groups: organizations who have turned the corner with their SOA initiatives and are seeing (or are about to see) real benefits from the new architectural approach, versus those companies who are still struggling with their SOA projects.”

Because SOA provides agility to change business application quickly as business conditions change, companies that have SOA in place are well positioned to handle market fluctuations, Bloomberg said. Those who are coming late to the SOA party, may not be so lucky.

Read more at: SearchSOA

Software AG Looks to SOA and BPM in 2008

Some SOA solution providers have recently acknowledged the difficulty. For instance, Oracle’s Larry Ellison was cited by analyst firm ZapThink in December as saying that SOA adoption has been “slow.” ZapThink analysts themselves haven’t shied away at all from critiquing the reasons for this sluggish SOA uptake, with ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg editorializing on “Who’s Killing SOA?”

Read more at: Application Development Trends