ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap 3.0

Download or purchase ZapThink’s popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster!

ZapThink Announces Major Update to Popular SOA Implementation Roadmap Poster

ZapThink, the industry’s foremost experts, advisers, and educators in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture, is responding to customer demand with today’s publication of the third version of its popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster. The company distributed over 100,000 copies of its first two versions of the poster, the first in 2003 and then updated in 2005. The latest version adds cutting-edge thought leadership in SOA, includes detail on architectural artifacts, and expands coverage of SOA Quality, Enterprise Mashups, and more.

Read more at: Emediawire

SOA synergy? Progress, Iona mix different ESB models

“These product lines only have about a 10 percent overlap,” said Hub Vandervoort, CTO SOA Infrastructure Products at Progress, explaining the acquisition after it was announced Wednesday. He described the Progress and Iona product lines as 90 percent synergistic.

That argument held some weight with Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

“It’s nice to finally see an SOA infrastructure deal that makes good sense on both sides,” Bloomberg said. “Iona gets to be part of an organization that has strong sales and marketing, as well as a deep customer base, and Progress gets some of the higher quality technology on the market at what is arguably a fire sale price.”

The “fire sale price,” in Bloomberg’s opinion refers to the announced terms of the deal in which Progress is buying Iona for $4.05 per share in cash, which it said “represents a total equity value of approximately $162 million.”

Offering a brief financial history lesson, Bloomberg said: “True, no one would expect Iona to go for anything like their dot.com bubble high of almost $100 per share, but even so, their $4.05 per share deal price is still less than half their post-bubble high of around $8.60 reached in the spring of 2004.”

The $4.05 per share offer was unanimously approved by Iona’s board of directors, according to the Progress announcement, which noted that it was a 16 percent more than the average share price during the six months prior to Feb. 8, when Iona first announced that it was talking to a potential buyer.

Beyond the deal maker issues, Bloomberg supported Vandervoort’s contention that the two companies’ enterprise service bus products, Iona’s Artix ESB and the Sonic ESB Progress acquired in early 2006, are more complementary than competitive. The ZapThink analyst also noted that Iona also provides CORBA technology that pre-dates the SOA approach.

Read more at: SearchSOA

Service-Oriented Data Access

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying application functionality and data in the organization. To put this building block vision of SOA into practice requires a solid technical foundation, which includes a persistence layer that facilitates interaction with heterogeneous data sources that store and provide the structured and unstructured information that the enterprise runs upon.

The key to enabling SOA with such a persistence layer, in turn, depends upon abstracting access through data access technology. Technologies such as JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET play an integral role in the design and development of a SOA Data Services strategy. With best-of-breed data access technology in place, the organization stands a good chance of succeeding with their SOA efforts. If an organization drops the ball on data access, however, it’s unlikely the Services will exhibit the key building block characteristics the organization needs to meet their agility requirements.

A Roadmap for SOA Success

Presentation on the core challenges of SOA, with some practical advice on how to overcome those challenges. Included is a discussion of building the business case, finding funding, enabling the architects, building a team, and enabling reuse.

Presented in Toronto, ON, Canada on June 21, 2007 at an event co-sponsored by Progress/Sonic and Online Business Systems.

ZapForum Podcast: Semantic Integration & SOA

ZapForum Podcast for May 21, 2007 features

Guest Experts Ken Rugg, Vice President Products, DataXtend, Progress Software.

and Bradley Falk, Chief Architect, Western Region, Online Business Systems.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Define semantic integration, semantic models, and ontologies
• Understand the relationship between semantic integration and SOA
• Learn about the limitations of semantic integration

Open-Source ESBs on the Rise

“For those that want platforms, the commercial platforms are indeed getting much better, more robust and more feature-complete, so there’s nothing to complain about there,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “But that does make the open-source offering attractive to those who want a best-of-breed solution from a nonplatform vendor but are finding it harder and harder to find such solutions in the current consolidating market.”

However, “we haven’t yet seen an Eclipse-type wholesale buy-in by end users into a particular open-source ESB effort,” ZapThink’s Schmelzer said. “The ESB market still is mostly dominated by the commercial players, and we have to see if an open-source effort emerges as the dominant player. That said, the more consolidation we see that requires end users to pick their platform vendor of choice, the more that we’ll see such an open-source offering come to the fore.”

Read more at: eWeek

Online Business Systems: SOA For Justice & Public Safety

Online Business Systems (Online) is a midsize professional services firm that has built a business for over twenty years by focusing on aligning business needs with integration-centric IT solutions. Now, they are leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices as well to add a new level of agility to their integration offering for many different industries.

In particular, Online has been able to leverage SOA best practices within their Integrated Justice & Public Safety practice, which serves public responders, courts, and other parts of the justice system. These clients have particularly stringent integration requirements, due to the dynamic nature of law enforcement, the requirement for high levels of security and confidentiality, and the diverse, heterogeneous set of agencies who must work together. Online’s SOA capabilities, combined with their integration skills and business focus have enabled them to build many successful implementations in the justice and public safety arena.

The Mainframe as a First-Class SOA Participant

Today’s business imperative for IT is to do more with less, and to respond to ever-changing business requirements efficiently and inexpensively. It is vital, therefore, for organizations to get the most value possible out of legacy technology. The movement to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) demands that we reconsider the value of legacy and enhance its continued benefit to the business.

The business imperatives of agility and efficiency are core motivations for SOA, an approach for organizing existing IT resources to support changing business requirements in a flexible manner. For those organizations with legacy technologies like mainframes, SOA becomes a strategic approach for extending the value of of existing assets.

Simply incorporating the mainframe as a passive participant in a SOA implementation, however, does not fully leverage the inherent strengths of the mainframe — reliability, performance, scalability and security, to name a few. To fully exploit the mainframe with newer technologies and architectures, it is important to select an integration approach that provides industry standard interconnectivy without adding complexity, risk and cost.

A Mainframe Service Bus like DataDirect’s Shadow can provide such an integration foundation. Shadow provides a unified architecture for mainframe transformation supporting direct SQL access, real-time events, Web enablement, and the capability to both publish and consume Web Services. This type of middleware support can change the role of the mainframe and enable it to become a full-fledged, active participant in a SOA implementation.

ESB market report

“The real question is, how can an ESB help with a SOA implementation plan, which is the challenge a lot of enterprises face,” said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “Companies need to think through a plan, identify the business problem, figure out how to build services, then figure out the infrastructure. They may or may not need an ESB.”

As the larger vendors have added ESB capabilities to their offerings, the pureplays have broadened their capabilities as well. “Look at Sonic Software,” said Bloomberg. “They’re still leading with their ESB product, but Progress Software [Sonic's corporate parent] has reorganized. It’s significant that Progress has realized SOA is more than ESB. They have the Neon legacy integration, they have XML tooling. SOA requires a lot of different pieces. Sonic’s leading standalone ESB product is really not standalone anymore. Companies want a more comprehensive solution.”

According to ZapThink’s Bloomberg, “A key part of the SOA infrastructure has to do with the intermediary capability for loose coupling of services. If your existing middleware can’t do that, bring in some intermediary. If you have the need for additional integration infrastructure, get an ESB. If you already have that infrastructure you can use an intermediary, like SOA Software’s Network Director. The question is, do I need messaging infrastructure in addition to intermediary capabilities?”

“What we’re seeing from ESB vendors as well as consultants building SOA solutions, is that the bloom is off the ESB rose,” said Bloomberg. “Clearly the role of ESB is no longer thought of as a key piece of SOA infrastructure, but rather one piece of many moving parts to get SOA to work.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices