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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