March 2007 Archives

"There is no easy way of describing an ungoverned SOA." - Mark Greeff In a new interview, Software AG's Mark Greeff talks about how governance makes the difference between a well-managed SOA and a 'State Of Anarchy.' Take rogues services,... Read More..

A few days back, I opened up a discussion on the convergence of virtualization and service-oriented architecture. The convergence comes in many flavors. In one sense, SOA itself can be considered the "virtualization" of applications. But the main issue that... Read More..

The best request for proposal (RFP) for SOA may be one that doesn't even mention SOA. Read More..

Is it possible for your SOA to become a victim of its own success? If you have built and maintain a fairly healthy stable of services, and other departments across your enterprise begin adopting (or reusing) your services, your servers... Read More..

Ann Bednarz, writing in BPM Today, provides a list of 10 best practices for SOA: 1) Start with a process that previously has been opened. In other words, the path of least resistance. Pick a "target system" in which other... Read More..

Service-oriented architecture and enterprise data management have a lot of common ground, but tend to be treated as two separate entities. There are some industry observers who even say a well-designed data model, based on current database and data management... Read More..

Oh what a tangled Web we weave when first we practice to integrate.... My colleague Gian Trotta just conducted an interview with Leif Davidsen, worldwide product marketing manager for WebSphere Application Integration for IBM. (Podcast and transcript posted here.) Davidsen... Read More..

There has been a raging debate across the industry about whether reuse is the value that can be found in SOA, or if it's merely the latest attempt at object-oriented development. Marcia Kaufman of Hurwitz Group is in the reuse-is-value... Read More..

"Those with BPM skills are not typically part of the SOA discussion, and as such their knowledge and connection to the business has not transferred to the organization's separate efforts. What sort of business process knowledge can SOA folks learn... Read More..

SOA is more than tying together back-end systems. It can also serve as a strategy to advance a unified communications platform that enhances the customer experience. Dana Gardner provides this account of the Seaport Hotel's in-room "Seaportal" application, built using... Read More..

You would think that a large vendor that sells SOA solutions would have no issues implementing said solutions across their own enterprises. But, alas, getting employees to eat your own dogfood is just as challenging as selling solutions on the... Read More..

EbizQ colleague Brenda Michelson has just announced that the newly formed SOA Consortium is seeking enterprise architects to participate in an industry survey that seeks to help understand where EA is today, where it will be in the future, and... Read More..

If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the plethora of standards, specs, and protocols that have been generated in the name of simplifying service delivery, don't feel alone. There's at least 60 or more of these out there, covering everything from... Read More..

A new survey conducted by Forrester Consulting for Progress Software Corp. confirms what many IT professionals and managers in the trenches already suspected -- there's a lot of integration work going on out there, and much of it is still... Read More..

"Two SOA Projects That Can Pay for Themselves in Six Months" Now, there's an eye-catching headline if I ever saw one. (Okay, it probably doesn't rank up there with "I Was Abducted by Space Aliens," but you know what I... Read More..

SOA success doesn't come all at once -- it's built incrementally, usually starting with some type of integration project. Kicking off last week's Skyway Webinar (hosted and archived here at ebizQ), Mike Gilpin of Forrester Research spoke at length about... Read More..

One might think a high-tech manufacturing operation would be light years ahead of your average business in terms of service orienting applications. But even the techiest of the high techiest firms are still run on behemoth ERP systems that tend... Read More..