IT Uses Web Services to Preserve Data

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said about 50% of SOA initiatives are mainframe-based projects because companies can preserve the mainframe but “still have applications that are just as agile and flexible as anything they could build in Java or .Net.”

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Rescue Service for Mainframe Data

In addition, integrating legacy data with Web services interfaces can create other problems for businesses, says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. While most companies can usually cut integration costs by half with Web services, they may still have data-transformation issues, he says.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Service at Your Discretion

The market for SOA products and services will reach a total value of $4.5bn by 2005, and $43bn by 2010, according to ZapThink, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based analyst company that specialises in tracking web services and SOA.

Read more at: Computer Business Review

A defining moment for SOA

“More companies are understanding the big picture. Ask them if they know what an SOA is, they’ll say ‘yes.’ Ask them if they understand the business value proposition, they’ll say ‘yes’ and talk about reuse and other concepts,” said Jason Bloomberg, analyst with ZapThink LLC. “If you ask them who is on the SOA team, or what’s their schedule for SOA, that’s a different question.

“They want to know how to build the right services, how to deal with semantics and data consistency, and how to assemble the right team,” Bloomberg said.

A flexible IT architecture is the holy grail, Bloomberg said, and any kind of confusion hampers adoption.

“The root of the problem is that SOA is hard; architecture is hard,” Bloomberg said. “There’s no magic bullet.”

“Service-oriented architecture is an architectural discipline that centers on the notion that IT assets are described and exposed as Services. These Services can then be composed in a loosely-coupled fashion into higher-level business processes, which providing business agility in the face of IT heterogeneity.”
Ronald Schmelzer, analyst, ZapThink LLC

Read more at: TechTarget

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.

Legacy-Systeme stützen neue Dienste

Die Erwartungen an das neue Konzept sind hoch, da es Unternehmen ermöglicht, ihre IT den sich ändernden Anforderungen anzupassen und gleichzeitig bereits getätigte Investitionen zu schützen. Denn gerade die Frage, wie IT-Entscheider interne und unternehmensübergreifende Anwendungen sinnvoll integrieren und so ihre Geschäftsprozesse optimieren können, steht auf deren Agenda ganz oben. In den nächsten Jahren, so Ronald Schmelzer und Jason Bloomberg, Analysten bei dem Marktforschungsunternehmen Zapthink, wird es in der IT weniger darum gehen, neue Anwendungen zu entwickeln.

Read more at: LANLine (German)

More firms using Web services to integrate legacy apps

Products from the established mainframe players “make sense if you have investments in those technologies” that you plan on keeping for the long-term, says Ron Schmeltzer, senior analyst with consultancy ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass. But if you have older technology and are not looking to upgrade, it might make more sense to go with an independent software vendor for Web services help.

Read more at: TechTarget

Service-Oriented Architectures Underpin On-demand

Waltham, Mass-based research firm ZapThink said in a recent report that SOAs will offer the organizing principle behind the on demand computing movement, which is spearheaded by such vendors as IBM, HP, Computer Associates and Veritas. Web services are important to the adoption of service-oriented architectures because the XML standards on which they are based let companies connect data or processes to different applications.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Service-Oriented Process

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Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.