Practical SOA for Financial Services Presentations

Presentations given at ZapThink’s Practical SOA for Financial Services event in London on September 27, 2007.

Presenters and their presentations include:

• Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink: Welcome & SOA Adoption Trends for Financial Services and the World
• Michael Poulin, Head of Business Analysis & Web Delivery, Fidelity Investment International: Case Study in SOA: The Next Steps in the Organically Growing SOA
• Jim Mackay, Chief Marketing Officer, iTKO: SOA Quality and the Financial Services Industry
• David Davies, VP Products, Corizon: Agility at the User Interface
• William Morgan, Lead Technical Architect for Financial Services in the UK, LogicaCMG: SOA Case Study: Homeserve GB – Composite applications for insurance customer care
• David Wright, Director, Global Financial Services, Software AG webMethods: Real Value from SOA and BPM: How Financial Institutions can transform their Businesses and Get There Faster

Listen to the Podcast with previews of these presentations!

This document is a 75-page pdf with all of the slides presented at the event.

Attendees of the event can get this file by completing the emailed survey.

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Financial Services

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for September 20, 2007 features:

Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Michael Poulin, Head of Business Analysis & Web Delivery, Fidelity Investment International

Jim Mackay, Chief Marketing Officer, iTKO

David Davies, Vice President, Products, Corizon

William Morgan, Lead Technical Architect for Financial Services in the UK, LogicaCMG

David Wright, Director, Global Financial Services Software AG webMethods

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters spoke about at our Practical SOA for Financial Services event in London, England, on September 27, 2007.

Hear from these speakers on the following topics:

• Jason Bloomberg – SOA Adoption Trends for Financial Services and the World
• Michael Poulin – Case Study in SOA: The Next Steps in the Organically Growing SOA
• Jim Mackay – SOA Quality and the Financial Services Industry
• David Davies – Agility at the User Interface
• William Morgan – SOA Case Study: Homeserve GB – Composite applications for insurance customer care
• David Wright – Real Value from SOA and BPM: How Financial Institutions can transform their Businesses and Get There Faster

Software AG updates webMethods BPM suite

“They are making quite good progress, considering there’s a lot to integrate,” said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner of IT analyst firm ZapThink.

This is one area where there’s no rush, though, said ZapThink’s Bloomberg: the majority of Crossvision BPM customers also use Software AG’s Natural programming language and Adabas database, and they have no reason to leave the company.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Justifying & Funding your SOA Project

Many organizations struggle to build the business case for implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)–not because SOA doesn’t provide numerous benefits to the organization, but rather because they don’t properly identify the business problems in their organization that SOA would be particularly well suited to address.

This paper addresses this deficiency by delineating the most important business benefits of SOA: reduction in the cost of integration, achieving asset reuse, increasing business visibility, and achieving business agility. Implementing SOA to achieve these benefits, however, requires many capabilities that fall under the broad umbrella of SOA governance, including visibility into IT assets, change management, enforcement of best practices, measurement of effectiveness, collaboration capabilities, lifecycle management, and open standards support.

Governance at core of Software AG SOA strategy

Following Monday’s Webinar, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., was guardedly optimistic about the company’s chances of success after listening to Totev’s presentation. The analyst was impressed with Software AG’s emphasis on governance.

“They lead with SOA governance, which is an important priority for them to have,” he said. “Another key strength is that their ESB vision focuses on a mediation version and an orchestration version, two capabilities that are more critical to SOA infrastructure than simple integration is. Also, their business process tooling is unsurprisingly quite strong, as both companies had good, SOA-capable products in this space going into the merger.”

As for the German-based company’s ability to sell itself in the American market, Bloomberg sees that as being more problematic although not undoable if Software AG can successful blend its culture with the Virginia-based webMethods and California-based Infravio.

“Perhaps their greatest challenge, although it’s too early to say it’s a weakness, is pulling the cultures together so that they can be strong in the US market while remaining strong in Europe and elsewhere,” Bloomberg said. “In the past they have been ‘too German’ in many ways to do well in the US, so we’ll have to see if the new webMethods blood can tone this down.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Big SOA versus little SOA

In his role as vice president of SOA products webMethods/Software AG, Miko Matsumura, has been traveling across North America and Europe talking about service-oriented architecture (SOA) as well as teaching in the SOA Master Class that he helped launch last winter with the ZapThink LLC analysts to address the SOA knowledge gap. At the beginning of 2007, we talked to Matsumura about what he expected the year would bring for SOA. Two calendar quarters later, we wondered what he is seeing so far. One of the trends is a bifurcation of the service-oriented approach into enterprise-wide business alignment, which he calls “big SOA,” and more modest departmental type projects, he calls “little SOA.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Software AG CentraSite Community

Written by Tony Baer, Associate Analyst, ZapThink.

Governance is drawing significant attention from the boardroom down as a result of heightened regulation, increased competition, and constant change in the marketplace. There are two faces to SOA governance. On one hand, SOA governance simply means governing a SOA implementation initiative—for example, communicating corporate policies to developers implementing Services, and giving them the tools they need to follow those policies as they assemble the various elements of the SOA implementation. On the other hand, there’s a broader, more strategic definition of SOA governance: IT governance in the context of SOA.

Software AG takes a big picture view to SOA governance, based on the premise that SOA governance extends well beyond the governing of Web Services. It believes that the extensible nature of SOA requires a similarly extensible strategy to governance. Software AG has established the CentraSite Community as its strategy for providing a SOA governance solution that customers can adapt to their unique business and technology needs. Organizationally, the CentraSite Community promotes shared wisdom through its collaborative online presence. Architecturally, Software AG CentraSite registry/repository supports the community through its extensible data model and broad standards based approach. Because the CentraSite Community does not impose a one-size-fits-all governance solution, customers can implement the right governance recipe to meet their unique business needs.

SOA 2007: Adoption steady, but tech squabbles exist

Some good questions and bad solutions

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC

Encouraging: Enterprises are asking the right questions — questions about governance, loose coupling and agility.

Discouraging: Some vendors are still pushing integration software as the key to SOA, when in fact, more integration software is often the last thing enterprises need to be successful with SOA.

Better investment vs. CIO resistance

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC

Encouraging: Companies are starting to invest more in architecture: methodology, people, organizational change, and design. There’s more emphasis now on governance, quality and management.

Discouraging: Many end-users are being misled with regards to proper SOA adoption – focusing them more on implementing new infrastructure and not as much on building well-architected services. Many CIOs still don’t get the reason for SOA and are stubbornly resisting SOA adoption.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

SOA: Building the Roadmap

Written by ZapThink Associate Analyst Tony Baer.

By now, most Information Technology (IT) organizations have become aware of the potential of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to pierce through those silos. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, implementing SOA should be an incremental, iterative process that should start modestly. Your first foray into a SOA implementation should be through a pilot project, where your organization has the opportunity to conduct an evaluation to determine whether to make further investments. The goal is gain experience while mitigating the risks. Consequently, the scope of the pilot should be limited. Choose a handful of Services that will make a difference, and that people will notice.

Governance is essential. Lacking governance, SOA projects become yet another example of undisciplined software development. As your organization becomes more experienced with SOA, it eventually learns to compose business Services bridging those silos, and gradually becomes more efficient to the point where SOA supports business processes to the point where you can continuously optimize your business.

From a starting point of point-to-point integration, organizations evolve to developing more flexible dynamic couplings that exploit far more effectively the Services that they have exposed. At that point, governance becomes essential if SOA is to evolve beyond isolated, discrete connections to support an environment where Service contracts drive development, Services become composable, and the agility that SOA promises becomes reality.

The Value of SOA Governance

The definition of corporate governance is creating, communicating, and enforcing policies in a corporate environment. Governance is the key to balancing executive control with employee and customer empowerment across the enterprise. While many corporate governance activities don’t directly involve the information technology (IT) department, the enterprise does call upon IT to provide tooling for automating policy creation and enforcement, when it’s possible to represent policies in a machine-understandable format.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources to meet the changing needs of the business in flexible ways. Governance is an essential part of any SOA implementation, because it ensures that the organization applies and enforces the policies that apply to the Services that the organization creates as part of its SOA initiative. But more importantly, organizations can leverage SOA best practices to represent policies broadly in such a way that the organization can achieve better policy management, flexibility, and visibility into policy compliance across the enterprise.