Jeff Walker’s Session at SOAWorld Conference & Expo

According to IBM, Gartner, and other industry pundits, SOA applications will usher in a major replacement of the legacy systems that currently power organizations and commerce around the world. ZapThink, by contrast, sees SOA as a technology that will extend the value of existing legacy applications. While SOA architectural components are well understood and available from a variety of vendors, organizations are fundamentally on their own to create the business logic essential to introducing an SOA-compliant application.

Read more at: SOA World

ZapForum Podcast – Live at the Open Group (Part II)

In this second of two parts of the ZapForum Podcast series recorded live at the Open Group event in San Diego, CA on January 29, 2007, ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer interviews attendees and exhibitors at the event to learn more about their SOA plans, their thoughts on Enterprise Architecture and the role of the Open Group.

Interviewees for this podcast include:

• Sally White, Vice President, Business Development, Tenfold Corporation – Discussing the need for higher level tooling for non-developers, the role of composition and metadata, and declarative, model-driven approaches to Service-Oriented Business Application development.
  
  

• Dimitri Sirota – VP Marketing and Alliances, Layer 7 Technologies. Dimitri explores the area of network-aware applications and application-aware networking, its relevance to SOA, Web Services, and XML in general, how Service-oriented architects need to concern themselves with the network, why enterprise architects need to broaden their skills and the role of the Open Group in fostering this broadening.
  
  
  

• Miko Matsumura – Vice President, SOA Product Marketing – Miko explains the lack of skilled enterprise architects, critical human factors impacting SOA advancement, the SOAMasterClass.com site that provides needed education, credentialing and certification opportunities for EAs, and the role of the Open Group.

SOA business logic without coding?

A speaker in an earlier session had scoffed at predictions made early in the SOA hype cycle that sales managers would soon be building composite applications. Skepticism about “without programming” claims probably dates back at least to the 4GL languages of the 1980s that were marketed with similar boasts.

But in his corner, Walker has Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., who wrote this past summer that one of the challenges for SOA was to enable the simplified creation of Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBA) by composing services.

“TenFold takes a model-driven approach to composite application creation with their Enterprise TenFold SOA tool, providing a rapid, iterative approach to dynamic composite application creation that enables business users to model their requirements and then render applications minimizing the need for writing any programming code,” the analyst wrote.

Contacted after Walker’s talk, Bloomberg noted that the TenFold technology is more focused than tools that claim developers will never have to write another line of Java or C# again.

“The TenFold tool is especially good at building Web applications as well as Web services that can be incorporated into SOA implementations,” the analyst explained. “But it’s not intended as a be all and end all of service creation, but rather it’s ideally suited for creating those services that expose the capabilities of the applications constructed within the tool. In other words, it’s a Web application generation tool that can generate Web services for integration and incorporation into broader SOA implementations.”

Read more at: TechTarget

TenFold Releases Free Personal Edition Product

“ZapThink has long touted model-driven approaches as essential SOA best practices,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at ZapThink. “However, putting model-driven approaches to SOA into practice has been a challenge in the absence of tools that provide actual composite application delivery such as EnterpriseTenFold SOA offers. With TenFold’s tool, companies can now utilize the principles of Model-Driven Architecture for SOA implementations in a rapid, business-focused manner.”

Read more at: TenFold Press Release

ZapThink Publishes Report on TenFold

enFold® Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: TENF – News), provider of the EnterpriseTenFold® platform for rapidly building enterprise-scale SOA-compliant applications, announced today the findings of an independent report on EnterpriseTenFold SOA, a development platform for building Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBA’s) without programming.

The new report was written by ZapThink, a leading IT research and advisory firm specializing in XML, Web Services, and Service Orientation. The report concludes that TenFold offers companies a model-driven approach to composite application creation with the EnterpriseTenFold SOA tool, providing a rapid, iterative approach to dynamic application creation that enables business users to model their requirements and then render the desired application, minimizing the need for writing any programming code.

“ZapThink’s research report confirms that TenFold addresses one of the greatest challenges of implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is forming the service-oriented business applications by composing services,” said Robert Felton, TenFold’s Chairman, President, and CEO. “With our core technology, EnterpriseTenFold SOA, which provides a rapid, iterative approach to building applications, customers can save 90% on their development and maintenance costs as our technology makes service creation simple, flexible, and business-focused.”

Read more at: TenFold Press Release

TenFold: Accelerating Business-Focused Composite Application Creation

One of the greatest challenges to implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is in making the Service-Oriented Business Applications formed by composing Services simple, flexible, and business-focused. Too often, companies don’t know how to compose loosely-coupled Services into business processes that meet continually changing business needs. TenFold takes a model-driven approach to composite application creation with their EnterpriseTenFold SOA tool, providing a rapid, iterative approach to dynamic composite application creation that enables business users to model their requirements and then render the desired applications minimizing the need for writing any programming code.

BPM inside the belly of the SOA whale, part 2

“Any vendor who wants to have a credible SOA solution in order to build loosely coupled, composite, service-oriented applications will necessarily have to have a business process aspect to their product,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. “IBM, Oracle and Microsoft already have this capability as well as vendors like Sonic Systems, Fiorano and SOA Software. Even emerging composite application vendors like SEEC Systems, Webify Solutions, Tenfold and others are adding BPM capabilities to their SOA infrastructure. Vendors need to have process capabilities if they plan to have a credible solution in the space.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Webify looks to manage apps services

“Ten years ago these guys would be enterprise application vendors,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “Now they are service-oriented, composite-application vendors. It is noteworthy. It shows where the industry is headed.”

Schmelzer says other vendors, including Oracle and SAP, are breaking their application logic into components instead of assembling them into one massive application.

“The days of coming up with new applications and selling multimillion-dollar enterprise applications in monolithic blocks – I think those days are over,” Schmelzer says.

Read more at: NetworkWorld

TenFold Still Betting on Codeless App

Configuration, over coding, is a key imperative of service-oriented architectures, added Jason Bloomberg, an analyst for ZapThink. “What TenFold is talking about is the right approach.”

Read more at: SD Times