SOA in Action

In this second part of a two-part post on SOA governance, experts discuss some solutions to addressing SOA governance. Part I was a discussion of the most vexing challenges.

Pat Walsh says one way to effectively deliver SOA governance is to focus efforts on the individuals or lines of businesses that can directly benefit from the services. “One thing that we found is helpful is really keying on the identities of the people that are looking to get something out of the governance systems that are built for SOA,” he explains. “The key identities we look at obviously include the developers, but also the operations people, the business people that are looking for the reporting, and maybe metering and monitoring so they can see how the overall SOA is actually providing a return on their investment. Focusing in on some of the roles is also an important way to get beyond some of the hype of governance and the confusion that can cause.”

Theo Beack urges extending incentives to developers and managers to adopt SOA-based services. “With an ROI model, you can quantify how much money you saved the organization or how you helped increase the productivity or increase revenue -- and that can affect your bonus. And where people have started tying bonus incentives to governance, they see much higher adoption and compliance. So I think that's a very positive way to do it.”

Automate where possible, Theo adds. “The problem may be that governance processes and procedures may be disruptive to the organization. You can try to limit the disruption by automating where possible. For example, automate the steps required to promote specific assets or service from, say, development to QA to production. By doing that, it makes it easier for people to actually comply, because you don't increase the amount of manual steps tied to the productivity and any task they have to perform.”

Accenture’s David Nichols urges organizations to develop governance strategies early in their SOA processes. “We find some clients that are very early in their adoption and deployment of SOA to really zero in on a more centralized organizational governance approach,” he says. “What this allows them to do is standardize development of services, truly get their methodology in place for how they’re going to build, test and deploy their services and establish a foundation that allows them to reuse the services they create. Reuse is not a byproduct of SOA – it’s truly managed, and the effectiveness of reuse is only going to be done through your governance structure.”

Check out the full podcast interviews (MP3 downloads) with the experts here:

David Nichols, Accenture
Theo Beack, BEA
Pat Walsh, IONA
Dave Chappell, Oracle
Hub Vandervoort, Progress

These podcasts were part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, produced by InfoWorld. ebizQ, in cooperation with InfoWorld, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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Everyone talks about SOA governance these days, but few have been able to get their arms around it. Experts I spoke with for the recent InfoWorld series of podcasts talked about the challenges associated with SOA governance, and ways to address these challenges to assure greater SOA ROI.

In this first part, experts discuss the challenges of SOA governance.

For starters, SOA governance is often treated too narrowly within many organizations. IONA’s Pat Walsh says governance should address the broad lifecycle of SOA services, rather than get pigeonholed into environments. “I'm a fan of Darryl Plumber at Gartner, and he has a great saying about whereas people are trying to categorize things as design time and runtime, nowadays it's really design time, runtime, and all the time. Because you can't say that once I've designed something and I've put it into a run-time environment, I'm done.”

BEA’s Theo Beack says low visibility of services stymies governance efforts as well. “Visibility is insight into what exists, what assets exist within the organization,” he explains. “Visibility into which of these things have been employed? How have they been used?” Lack of visibility of services has a direct impact on any ROI that can be achieved, Theo says. “Many organizations find when they create all these wonderful things, that adoption and reuse is much lower than what they either anticipated or what they think would be required to get a positive outcome in ROI.”

The time and effort involved in enforcing policies also stymies governance efforts, Theo adds. “Once they implement the processes and the tools and so forth, they realized they just implemented more barriers from the personnel and the developers and all those people involved in the process, it becomes very time-consuming to really properly enforce all the policies, to follow the appropriate processes and so forth. It really becomes a challenge to motivate people to follow the governance rules and policies.”

Oracle’s Dave Chappell points to organizational and corporate culture issues that make effective governance a challenge. “You're changing your software processes where you used to have where silos of applications that performed specific business functions. And you had, along with that, siloed organizations that were built in support of those applications. And, since the applications never really communicated with each other that well, it was also not necessary for the organizations to communicate, share and work together that well, either.”

Because SOA seeks to open up many processes and systems, SOA proponents may run into headwinds from their owners, Dave continues. “Now we're talking about tearing down application silos, picking apart individual pieces of business functionality that's within each one of those applications, opening that up and sharing that across departmental boundaries, across organizational boundaries and building new automated composite applications that really share pieces of what used to be siloed application.”

This new openness and sharing mandated by SOA may create stresses across organizations, Dave says. “That brings some interesting challenges and questions of, who's going own these new composite applications that span across the different, what used to be siloed applications? What's the new ownership model across that? What's the new organization model going to be in support of that? How are different architectural teams going to work together and decide what goes and what stays in terms of, you know, the IT consolidation that's occurring from new SOA initiatives. How are the business functions also going to be realigned in order to work together better? And then -- most importantly: How are the technology and the business folks going to work together effectively?”

In part 2 of this two-part post, the experts address solutions to the SOA governance challenge.

Check out the full podcast interviews (MP3 downloads) with the experts here:

David Nichols, Accenture
Theo Beack, BEA
Pat Walsh, IONA
Dave Chappell, Oracle
Hub Vandervoort, Progress

These podcasts were part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, produced by InfoWorld. ebizQ, in cooperation with InfoWorld, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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As far as SOA is concerned, the days of exploration, speculation, and tire-kicking are over. It's time to get down to business.

SOA implementations no longer focus on prototypes and proof of concept, says Accenture’s David Nichols. Instead of seeking technology-centric solutions, companies are focused on addressing new capabilities or improving business processes.

I recently spoke to David to explore SOA ROI and other pertinent matters as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)

From David's' vantage point, the footprint of SOA projects is growing significantly. "One thing that we'’ve noticed in the last 18 months or so is that our clients -- especially the early adopters -- have been rapidly evolving and increasing their SOA footprint," he relates. "Accenture’s high performers IT research reveals some very, very interesting trends to us. About half of the clients and companies that we consider to be high performers are currently looking at implementing an SOA-based architecture within the next 12-18 months -- evolving away from the prototype and the proof of concepts into true SOA-based architectures."

And SOA is increasingly about getting down to business, in the literal sense. "The interesting thing about this is a lot of these clients are not looking for a better technology or technology-centric solution, they’re focused on addressing new capabilities within their organization, or closing the gaps between some business processes that they may not be performing at the level that they would like them to perform," David says.

The goals of these SOA projects include "bringing products to market quicker, opening up new capabilities within their business, and being able to bring those to market a lot quicker and truly optimizing the way that they run their business."

As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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As part of my recent industry experts podcast series for InfoWorld, I explored the emerging trend toward Event-Driven Architecture, and how it fit into SOA as we know it today.

Below are some of the pressing questions about EDA, and the answers provided by experts in the podcasts:

Why should we care about EDA, and what will EDA do for SOA-based organizations?

Oracle’s Dave Chappell says as an SOA is formed, it creates a collective network capable “of receiving asynchronous communications operating as an autonomous unit of work, and then feeding results back into the collective network. That collective network becomes this live stream of events that are constantly communicating information about your live business as it's happening. And then there are technologies such as complex event-processing engines that can tap into those live streams of events and look for a complex or sophisticated patterns and then report that up to a high level business function to make something meaningful out of it.”

As a result, end users can “gain real-time insight into your business as its happening and make real-time decision and course corrections along the way. The analogy I like to make is not only can you see that you're losing a million dollars an hour, you can also do something about it in a real-time fashion.”

(Download the full interview with Dave Chappell here.)

Is EDA a separate initiative from SOA, or is it an extension of mature SOA environments?

BEA's Theo Beack finds that EDA is an extension of SOA. “What we found is that the interest really comes from those customers that have more the real-time type of environment and are quite mature in their SOA strategies and implementations,” he says. “EDA then becomes a natural extension of this, of the existing work that they've done over the last three, four, five years.” EDA projects will take time, just as SOA projects have, Theo says. “As we saw with SOA over the last three or four years, customers are taking a very methodical approach. They really know that there's risk involved with implementing and doing something brand new that they have to learn this learning curve that they have to go through, they have to really familiarize themselves with concept, technologies and so forth.”

How difficult is EDA to implement?

David Nichols of Accenture says EDA fits very neatly into emerging SOAs infrastructures. “The nice thing and the appealing thing about event driven architectures is you can address this early in the architecture deployment, or sometime in the future with very little disruption to the existing architecture that’s in place.” Nichols says that he’s involved on SOA efforts that do not yet include EDA, but these projects will be quickly adaptable to EDA when the time comes. “The foundation is clearly laid without too much disruption to address and implement event driven architecture sometime in the future. We believe this will eventually be a very large component of most SOA-based solutions.”

How long will the transition to EDA take for most organizations?

As with the transition from JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services) to SOA, EDA is a gradual process that will occur over the course of several years.

Hub Vandevoort of Progress Software says SOA is undergoing the same transition as personal computers underwent from DOS to Windows. “That took about a decade to happen,” Hub says. “It wasn't until 1995, more or less, that programmers were completely comfortable with the idea of the Windows programming model. The tools that evolved, the component models were rich, the libraries were extensive and now, every programmer programs that way. But it was a ten-year transition.”

SOA is undergoing the same transition, Hub points out, which is “exactly the same metaphorical shift from command and control-oriented, interactive SOA to more event-driven SOA. That shift will take place over ten years, but will result in the same kind of quantum leap that the Windows shift did.”

(Download the full podcast interview with Hub Vandervoort here.)

These podcasts were part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, produced by InfoWorld. ebizQ, in cooperation with InfoWorld, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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There are a bunch of ways to measure SOA success -- development hours spent on projects, speed of new product rollouts, deferred enterprise application upgrades, cost savings by switching from live customer service to self-service Web access.

But one company found a different way to gauge the progress of its SOA efforts -- by the reduced tonnage of the servers and infrastructure in its data center. "They calculated that by the time they were finished with their new SOA initiative, they would have eliminated six tons of iron in their data center!" observes Oracle VP and chief technologist Dave Chappell. I recently spoke to Dave to explore SOA ROI and other pertinent matters as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)

Dave keynoted the Forum with a discussion on how grid computing supports SOA scalability.

In the podcast, Dave discussed how companies can go about measuring ROI as they launch their own SOA endeavors. "It's usually about eliminating redundant systems -- that's the first place where folks start," he explains. "And then, the emphasis shifts to being able to go after new markets and so forth."

SOA metrics such as reduced hardware and IT cost reduction are relatively straightforward, but wider business benefits are more of a challenge to capture and measure, Dave says. "There's much less, much less of a tangible benefit and usually it takes a broader effort across the company to be able to measure. So that's a little harder but, you know, in the next year or so, we'll start to see more of those, where businesses are actually measuring how they are able to grow, based on the adoption of SOA."

Beyond ROI, the landscape is changing in terms of what companies want from SOA adoption. A few years ago, the industry focused largely on basic infrastructure and how to define service enablement. The discussion shifted to enterprise service buses and process orchestration.

Now the big challenge is how to address the necessary support functions to build out flexible, automated business processes to support SOA initiatives. Event-driven architecture and complex event processing are among those accompanying technologies, Dave explained.

As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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There's been a lot of debate across the industry as to whether SOA works best when rolled out through smaller, targeted projects, or as part of a broader enterprise effort.

For Pat Walsh, VP of marketing for IONA, there's no question as to which approach delivers the best results -- SOA is strongest when you start small and scale fast. I recently spoke to Pat on where SOA ROI is being seen as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)

A small, manageable project can demonstrate how SOA principles reduce time to market, building support for a larger implementation. After scaling SOA throughout the organization, companies see reduced time to market and greater efficiency through service reuse. Don't "boil the ocean for building out SOA within the organization," Pat advised. "Start with something that is manageable. And demonstrate how SOA principles can affect time to market of that little project and see the direct benefits that it provides to the business."

"What tends to happen then is that you get great support from both IT and the business and then you can scale out the overall SOA solutions that you have."

Pat points to one particular customer in the telecom space that followed this principle. "They now have a dominant position," he explains. "They reused systems that they had used for plain old telephone service and for high-speed IP connectivity amongst their corporate clients and repositioned those services to create a voice-over-IP solution."

In addition to greater scalability, Walsh says IONA's customers are seeing ROI from SOA in both hard and soft kinds of costs. SOA implementations reduce the need for large outlays of hardware and software stacks and also enable greater leveraging of existing resources, meaning greater success rates and faster completion times for business projects.

As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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There’s been a lot of debate over how to best measure SOA success. The truth is, unfortunately, most companies don't have any metrics in place. They simply don't know what's working -- it just seems right, or anecdotally, people are saying good things about the service. The problem is, companies have no clue how well their SOA is working -- or if it needs recalibrating?

Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software, has a simple and direct way to measure SOA success -- the level of IT backlogs. I recently spoke to Hub as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)

In companies implementing SOA, the overall backlog of IT requests is starting to shrink, he says. Companies are seeing drastic reductions in project cycle times and consolidation in purchasing across the enterprise.

The decrease the IT backlog can be an interesting metric to judge the efficiency and ROI of the SOA implementation. Then, Hub suggests, look at the arrival rate and analyze the revenue stream from the line of business and look at the numbers in the reuse cycle. "If you see the batch rate going down and it becoming more of a continuous stream of delivery, those start to point to the loftier goals of reuse and agility," he says.

Hub also says there should be no doubt that the increased reuse of service and IT assets directly relates to the bottom line and business growth. SOA is now entering its second generation of deployment, he points out. “The first generation is where people were learning what SOA was and is. Getting in at a single-project level. And most of the work has been in adopting the interfaces and the methodologies and the new technology of SOA. Maybe some of those long-reaching goals aren't yet getting traction. But even at that level, the kind of things that we're seeing is that when customers apply SOA to what we call business change projects, things that have a very laser focus on achieving a specific business objective, then what we're seeing is two tangible measures, even in the short term.”

Hub cited the example of a company that leveraged its buying power with SOA and is saving $40 million a year. “They were, in effect, buying all the raw materials at a corporate level across 136 plants.” This purchasing power was consolidated into a single service. Now, vendors see the company as one entity, not 136, he explained. This enabled the company to basically reduce 40 million from the demand-side supply chain annually. SOA allowed them to achieve those kinds of benefits.”

Besides aiding business agility, Hub predicts that SOA will usher in more event-driven architecture (EDA). SOA and EDA are two sides of the same coin, he says. “You'll see eventing-oriented applications, whether that's for real-time reporting, business activity monitoring or business event monitoring.” The event-oriented model may eventually replace the idea of BPM, he predicts, but for now BPM is also here to stay.

As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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I’ll be keynoting this week’s SOA Congress, being held in the beautiful city of Mainz, Germany. The topic is “Roadmap to SOA - How to implement a Successful SOA Project” — I’ll be talking about the role SOA proponents need to play to foster change within their enterprises, recent SOA research, and trends for the year ahead. I look forward to meeting everyone there.

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ebizQ colleague Elizabeth Book provides a wrap-up of BEA CTO Paul Patrick's keynote at this week's InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum.

Paul talked in depth about the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0 social computing initiatives. He noted that people are using Web 2.0 methodologies "as a way to get closer to their customer. SOA is forming the base foundation for doing this. The SOA remains in charge of the data."

It's a more organic-like thinking, Paul said. "Expand your SOA with a new kind of innovation. Ask yourself, how can I take this social computing which is organically-based and marry it with the standards-based, shared services ecosystems?"

Another interesting observation Paul made: Ten years ago, all the advanced computing capabilities -- the fun stuff such as broadband Internet access -- were in the office. Now, the cutting-edge stuff (such as collaborative computing) is at home, and the office lags behind.

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It's clear SOA is showing many benefits to IT operations, improving developer productivity through reuse, and making it unnecessary to change 50 interfaces when a customer wants a change. But how much of an impact is SOA having on the business itself?

That's the question I sought to answer in a series of podcasts with industry experts, published as part of the recent InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. In my first podcast chat (MP3 link here), I talked with Theo Beack, vice president of engineering and deputy CTO at BEA Systems, about what kind of business benefits are being seen as a result of SOA.

Theo explained that there are some instances where SOA helped stave off bankruptcy, and thrive through a renewed vigor in customer service. Adopting SOA to address customer satisfaction helped a California-based energy company better listen to its markets, Theo explains. “They were able to reduce infrastructure and cut support costs substantially. They were able to standardize their infrastructure to support this initiative, and accelerate their time to market with very creative solutions for the customer. In the past, their level of customer satisfaction was not very positive.”

This is a case in which SOA is being adopted in support of new business initiatives — such as attracting new customers or retaining existing ones. Customer service is just one area ripe for service-oriented systems.

How does a company know how much of a difference SOA is making? Theo also pointed out that ROI measurement can be elusive, however. However, this is a problem that had been around long before SOA came on the scene. "For IT organizations that have a very strong alignment with business, it's much easier to measure ROI. It's a struggle that is going through all over the world. It's not so much as a result of SOA -- organizations need to better align with IT and these IT initiatives with its portal, with its ERP system, with its SOA -- all of these initiatives really are being undertaken to support the business. And if there's a good alignment, it's much easier to measure the ROI."

Theo reports seeing many customers working within a BPM context. “I would say that a substantial percentage of our customers have either implemented BPM already or are doing it as part of the overall IT optimization strategy,” he says. “Most of them find that, as a result of the SOA work, it’s really possible for them to automate their processes.” More and more customers are moving from applications-centric to process-centric solutions, better leveraging existing applications and increasing efficiency.

Event-driven architecture is another area of growing interest, Theo pointed out. EDA is still in its earlier days, but companies are starting to include EDA in their SOA strategies, particularly companies that have a real-time type of environment and mature SOA implementation. “EDA then becomes a natural extension of the existing work that they’ve done over the last three, four, five years,” he explains.

Governance remains a key area of importance, and sometimes those challenges are related to more than just technology. “Every single organization where they’ve implemented governance, there is a different pattern and a different spin on how they successfully implement it,” Theo says. “And that success is totally based on the dynamics of the culture of the respective organizations.”

Theo cites three key challenges companies face in motivating employees to follow governance rules: low visibility, low adoption, and lack of automation. He suggests that, in order to overcome these respective challenges, companies set up a central repository to attract, capture, and analyze use of assets. "For SOA visibility, set up a central repository where you can attract the assets, capture them, see how they are being used and tied to that is the SOA implement is where management capabilities to monitor your fabric, to gain insight in what's been deployed, how they've been used, how they are performing."

Theo also recommends that companies balance positive and negative reinforcement in order to encourage project teams to comply with governance standards, such as by tying bonus incentives to compliance with governance standards

Listen to my entire interview with BEA's Theo Beack here. (MP3)

As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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SOA is more than service-oriented architecture. It's the underlying philosophy to a a variety of converging trends reshaping the way technology is advancing business.

This 'mashup' of trends that engage SOA was in evidence at this week's InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, held in New York. I had the opportunity to drop in on the conference, and found a range of topics under discussion as enabling or being enabled by SOA -- master data management, Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0, mashups, and grid computing, just to name a few.

Dynamic David Linthicum, who also has his own channel here at ebizQ, stole the show, leading two informative sessions, as well as an all-day workshop on making SOA a working reality in business.

The role of SOA in master data management (MDM) was illustrated in the first keynote, Martin Brodbeck, executive director for strategic architecture at Pfizer. (For more insights on Master Data Management, I recently blogged on business intelligence/data warehouse luminary Claudia Imhoff’s session at Teradata, here.)

Pfizer’s challenge, being the $48-billion pharmaceutical giant it is, was bringing together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition. For example, Brodbeck related, “we had four to five definitions of what ‘customer’ meant.” To help this effort to succeed and deliver, Brodbeck’s team turned to SOA to decouple its data from its applications, such as SAP, Oracle, and WebLogic. “SOA is the mechanism through which you begin distributing data,” he explained. The team generated a standard set of interfaces for accessing its MDM tool “and deployed it into our SOA architecture.”

MDM and SOA have another thing in common — both require enterprise governance to succeed. Pfizer’s MDM governance structure strongly resembles one assembled for SOA, led by a business sponsor. “Master data management is much more about governance than it is about technology,” Brodbeck said.

Mashups -- the loading of data from disparate sources from across the network into front-end Ajax-enabled applications -- also got plenty of attention at the conference. Mashups are an untamed form of composite application that has been part and parcel of SOA projects form years now. IONA's Eric Newcomer and IBM's David Boloker, among others, demonstrated mashups that pulled data from a variety of back-end and Internet-based sources. IBM's Boloker demonstrated IBM's QEDWiki, a tool for rapid front-end deployments that even business users can use.

Oracle's Dave Chappell provided insights on the convergence of grid computing with SOA. Namely, SOA requires a robust underlying infrastructure to effectively scale as service traffic spikes. Dave talked about the ability of both stateful and stateless services to scale across multiple nodes as demand requires.

As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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Service oriented architecture has come a long way over the past decade, and progress has been impressive. But issues around immature standards and proprietary platforms still make the SOA dream elusive -- and don't expect any significant progress any time within the next three to four years.

That's the prognosis offered by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, who kicked off ebizQ's SOA in Action conference with a progress report on the state of SOA. Click here and proceed to the "Conference Hall" to access the archives of all nine presentations. (Free registration required.)

Roy offered some history that I was not aware of -- that the actual term "Service Oriented Architecture" was first coined by Alexander Pasik, then a Gartner analyst, around 1994.

Roy and fellow Gartner analyst Yafim Natis published their first report on SOA in 1996, predicting that most companies would have adopted the paradigm for large applications by 2001. "That wasn’t quite right, we were off by three or four years," he recounted. "It took until 2004 or so until a third of large applications had some traces of SOA in them. A majority of applications today use some SOA in some part of their operations."

He may not want to take credit for first identifying the SOA trend, but Roy has been on top of this movement right from the beginning. I first saw him speak at a BEA-hosted event in New York back in 1996, when he predicted the shift away from applications toward middleware component-based architectures.

Now, SOA is part of a tide sweeping enterprises across the globe, he said. No matter what type of organization, "SOA is going to happen anyway, because there are so many factors pushing it," he said. "The packaged applications that are being offered on the market are SOA, so if you buy a package, you’re probably going to get SOA. The development tools tat are being offered by all the vendors are suitable for SOA, so people are going to be going to service oriented architecture at a fast pace."

However, interoperable standards development has slowed to a crawl, forcing companies to build or buy proprietary gateways and connectors to achieve some semblance of service-orientation across different systems. "It’s going to be more difficult to achieve heterogeneous SOA spanning different operating systems and more app servers than what we would like," Roy said. "We’re still going to have SOA, it’s going to come at a fast pace, but unfortunately, its going to be more difficult to have heterogeneous SOA than what we all had hoped."

Cooperative standards development is and will remain fairly stagnate for the foreseeable future, Roy added. "Between today and 2011, we’re not anticipating a lot of growth," he said. "The services that work today, the compatibility today is limited to fairly low-level interactions -- the kind of interactions that you would see taking place between the presentation layer of the application and the business logic layer of the application. In most cases we’re talking about a request and reply model, and we’re not talking about advanced quality of service features."

What is needed is server-to-server quality of service standards, Roy urges. "What we don’t have much in standards today is the server-to-server kind of traffic, where a service provider component talks to another service-provider component. This is where you would have a component doing business logic and data logic, acting as a consumer, talking to another component that’s doing business logic and data logic. For these kinds of interactions, you need other types of features -- things like quality of service, involving message queuing, publish and subscribe, and other kinds of capabilities."

Roy observed that it has almost taken five years "to get Reliable Messaging to be implemented by most of the vendors, though its not quite here yet. We are expecting that to happen by 2011."

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It was just a couple of years ago that talk of "service-oriented architecture" raised many skeptical eyebrows. As the old wise saying goes, 'If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.' In many respects, SOA -- with its promises of almost universal integration, agility, and IT-business alignment -- seemed too good to be true.

However, as we've seen over the past week at the ebizQ online "SOA in Action" conference -- speaker after speaker talked about the success that that is being seen with SOA, the multiple ways organizations of all sizes and types can realize the benefits of SOA, and new thinking being applied to nagging enterprise problems.

Over the coming weeks and days, I will be providing highlights on the various sessions that took place at ebizQ's event -- there's far too much for a single blog post.

Feel free to check out all nine sessions, which are archived for on-demand listening, here.

In the meantime, Krissi Danielsson has published a great overview of my panel discussion with industry luminaries Phil Wainewright and Dana Gardner on "SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, SaaS, and Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together."

Dana and Phil agreed to disagree on the speed of the Web 2.0 and SOA convergence -- Dana sees the two paradigms as "complementary," and noted that many of the Web 2.0 techniques around rapid front-end application development can be considered a form of "Guerrilla SOA."

Phil, however, cautions that Web 2.0 may be too uncontrolled and ungovernable to blend in with more deliberate and planned SOA methodologies. "I think it'll be a few years before Web 2.0 and SOA really coexist," Wainewright said. "Web 2.0 is so ill defined and people are still using it to experiment rather than with a definitive purpose."

Both Phil and Dana agree that the combined forces of SOA and Web 2.0 will be tremendous market disruptors.

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