SOA in Action

As I noted in my recent series of posts on 2007 SOA success stories (here, here, here, and here) , this past year saw a multitude of positive stories emerging around SOA deployments. Here are some more highlights of companies that "got it" when it came to applying SOA principles in proactive places.

To speed up product roll-outs. Comcast Corporation turned to SOA techniques to integrate and wrapper literally thousands of back-end and legacy systems to provide new front-end services for the business. Comcast grew over the decades through acquisitions of local cable operators and media companies. As a result, the company has a large range of siloed applications and siloed product lines. Examples of new services launched include portals enabling wireless access for technicians, as well as a customer service portal -- both sharing and leveraging the same services. With tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each would save Comcast $100 million a year. The company’s 20,000 customer service technicians originally had to look through 10 or more applications to attempt to solve problems. Now, a unified call center and problem resolution portal not only helps its staff save time and money, but the same services are also now made available to technicians over their mobile phones as well as to customers. In addition, Comcast intends to cut turnaround times for new offerings from months to 24 hours, using SOA methods.

To unchain stovepiped systems. Albert Heijn (AH), a big retailer based in the Netherlands, lacked visibility into its supply chain, and was forced to rely on fixed replenishment schedules that were based on local demand forecasts. The company turned to a SOA-based approach to bridge its previously separated technology environments. Now, each of the chain's 720 stores connects to a central broker at AH's headquarters, which in turn connects to back-office applications. AH can now bridge previously separated application-to-application and B2B environments within a single infrastructure that also controls the supply chain. Information on each retail sale streams all the way back to suppliers. All point-of-sale data is automatically aggregated with sales data from across all stores and delivered to a centralized replenishment application. Decision makers now get replenished data every half hour to help with supply chain decisions.

To unchain supply chains. Emerson, a manufacturer, employed a service-oriented strategy that brought together the purchasing functions of 70 separate business units that purchase goods from 35,000 suppliers. Before the XML-EDI implementation, each unit communicated with its own suppliers. Now the suppliers see one organization. merson spent about $500,000 developing the hub, but reports it "has recovered those costs several times over." For example, putting 10 suppliers in the same shipping container cuts costs by 35%, and the company says it has saved millions in transport costs by consolidating shipping.

To increase retail operating efficiency. Kohls Department Store chain is employing SOA to help meet its goal of increasing profitability by five percent a year, primarily through operating efficiency. Over the past year, Marshall's department has been engaged in projects to enhance analytics and decision support, marketing and CRM, multi-channel systems, point of sale systems, and a warehouse management system. Plus, the company forged an agreement with Chase to manage its credit card business, which required closer integration with the bank's systems.

To keep from getting creamed. Daisy Brand, a leading domestic sour cream manufacturer, employed SOA to speed up the shipping processes for its highly perishable product. The company had a variety of systems and formats that tended to throw monkey wrenches into its distribution processes. Order changes, for example, span manual (fax, email, spreadsheets, etc.) and system functions (EDI, ETRP, third party freight, home-grown logistics and shipping applications), causing the process to slow and increasing spoilage costs. There were yawning gaps between systems, business processes and employee roles coupled with inevitable customer-driven changes were causing those processes to breakdown and impact the business. Implementing SOA-enabling tools, the company rebuilt its order change process to incorporate everything from a faxed order to customer EDI shipping acknowledgements to RFID product information. Daisy Brand generated a positive return on investment within six months and provided shared visibility into the order change process across groups and roles.

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Entropy is "the energy within a system that's unavailable for work."

Such has been the problem with project-driven IT, says Miko Matsumura, VP and Deputy CTO of Software AG webMethods. IT funds have been going into projects, versus a more holistic approach to leveraging enterprise technology.

ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein recently spoke with Miko, who said SOA offers a solution to what he called 'IT entropy.'"

"The general idea is that as we build IT systems project by project, which is the way they are funded, as time goes on we end up with a lot of code which the organization has expended energy and dollars on, but which is no long usable to do work," Miko said. "Over time, entropy in IT systems increases. The general idea is that if we adopt a SOA approach to building systems, we create more of reusable code and less entropy, making more of the IT investment available for new work on an ongoing basis."

Historically, IT has been funded by "an endless stream of funded projects sent into IT," leading to a tangle of complexity, Miko explained. IT systems need to be moved to more harmony and order, thus making more of IT available for work.

Miko also sounds an optimistic note: "If you get an SOA architect together with a finance person, you can actually have a legitimate conversation about things like reusability.. things like non-recoverable engineering... and how the majority of IT dollars are now going towards maintaining systems that are degrading and falling apart because of so many years of ignoring these systems..."

The complete podcast with Miko can be found here.

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SOA was going strong in 2007, and companies discovered a myriad of uses for this emerging methodology. For some companies, it was a way to avoid a costly ERP system upgrade, while for others, it was a way to achieve faster time to market. Here are some more world-class examples of how and where SOA made a difference over the past year:

As an end-run around a major ERP systems upgrade. Dow Corporation SOA-enabled its SAP R/2 system, making an upgrade to R/3 unnecessary. Dow's "Next Enterprise Architecture (NEA)" is based on SAP's Netweaver and MySAP. The SOA implementation will allow Dow to develop new systems while running existing SAP R/2 and in-house systems, which it plans to replace over the next 10 years. The first five applications Dow is developing as part of NEA will provide a highly integrated view of Dow's operations worldwide. In addition, managers and staff will gain easier access to the information they need, and systems development staff will be able to respond to their changing needs more quickly.

To automate manual processes. Safeco, an insurance company, launched an SOA initiative intended to support new product development and business process improvements. The goal of the SOA project was to create an enterprise component which can process all matching requests by comparing Motor Vehicle Registry (MVR) records to policy records. Most of the time, there were manual processes associated with the MVR matching process, since records did not match online. The Safeco SOA team saw at least four major benefits coming out of their efforts, including legacy reuse, greater interoperability, more rapid turnaround (solution delivery within eight weeks), and very few lines of code required to accomplish integration. "The process implementation was done with less than 20 lines of code which were written for a special mapping capability," Safeco's SOA team reported.

To track the miles. Aeroplan, originally the frequent-flier plan for Air Canada, used SOA to expand its reach to both consumers and business partners in supporting customer loyalty rewards programs. Aeroplan's mainframe-based systems were originally built around supporting frequent-flier miles, until Air Canada spun the company off two years ago. Aeroplan's challenge was to expand its Its range of offerings beyond what was a limited number of flights on Air Canada routes. Enter Web services, which helped Aeroplan integrate with partners to expand its program beyond airline seats, while still leveraging its mainframe as a back-end transaction engine, but add service layers for interacting with business partners and consumers.

To run a regional government more efficiently. The Ontario provincial government has been running an SOA-based infrastructure for close to a decade, calling it their "common components" approach. Ontario's SOA didn't start out as a huge, concerted drive to service-orientation. Rather, there were many developments along the way involving different departments and applications. Things started in 1998,when the government consolidated 24 ministry IT departments, creating eight new IT organizations responsible for "clusters" of ministries with similar or related responsibilities and ways of doing business. The new IT organizations were charged with harvesting as much reuse as possible. In addition, 24 different HR and ERP systems were replaced by single enterprise-wide systems. The province's SOA effort includes SOA centers of excellence that develop and implement shared tools and platforms based on .NET framework and Java Platform. A Common Components & Applications branch helps identify common components and applications.

To untangle spaghetti architecture. Brokerage giant Morgan Stanley employed SOA techniques to fix its internal IT mess. The firm had a lot of the usual issues hold back many organizations -- stovepiped systems, branch offices that wouldn't, or couldn't, communicate or share files, and a corporate culture in which developers were accustomed to doing everything themselves. The company turned to an SOA approach to better reuse IT assets and to provide more and better performance data, made available through dashboards and portals, so it could better track the profitability of individual branches and product lines.

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In keeping with the theme of this blog, here are some more examples of areas where SOA has been put to work over the past year, mainly gathered from my blog posts over at ZDNet:

To run the world's largest particle accelerator. Event-driven SOA is now being employed for the monitoring controls at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Interestingly, the project is powered by Java-based technologies, not Web services. The SOA-based system takes readings from 30,000 gauges and publishes them to an enterprise service bus. Technicians at workstations and PC browsers — as well as autonomic systems and auditing databases–subscribe to the service readings.

To tie together customer service data for faster problem resolution. Comcast has been employing SOA methodologies to better connect customer service activities, and thus avoid such gaps in analyzing network problems. With tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each could save Comcast $100 million a year. The company’s 20,000 customer service technicians originally had to look through 10 or more applications to attempt to solve problems. Now, a unified call center and problem resolution portal not only helps its staff save time and money, but the same services are also now made available to technicians over their mobile phones as well as to
customers. The portal includes information about service across neighborhoods.

To facilitate master data management. Pfizer used SOA to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition. For example, the company had four to five definitions of what ‘customer’ meant. Pfizer turned to SOA to decouple its data from its applications, such as SAP, Oracle, and WebLogic. SOA was employed as the mechanism through which you begin distributing data. The team generated a standard set of interfaces for accessing its MDM tool and deployed it into its SOA architecture.

To better integrate disparate vendor products. Intel turned to SOA to reduce the amount of resources being put into point-to-point types of integration between various enterprise packages. The company was spending an inordinate amount of development capacity in both developing and then sustaining those integrations as vendors would change their products. Intel reports that it has seen a return on investment “in excess of tens of millions of dollars” as a result of its three-year-old SOA effort.

To improve customer service and more accurately project dividends in the gaming industry. And, finally, with thanks to Lorraine Lawson over at IT Business Edge, we have an example that specifies the gaming industry, but I think the intelligent, real-time customer relationship management described is no gamble. Such information, made available across the enterprise, can greatly raise the stakes on competitiveness in all industries. Harrah’s employed SOA to learn more about its customers across all its properties, which include several prominent resorts and casinos. Workers can now easily identify and reward regular customers across the company’s numerous holdings. SOA also made it easier for Harrah’s to acquire and integrate new companies.

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Thanks to a combination of SOA techniques, Ajax code, and open source technology, listeners in the Chicago area now have access to a YouTube-ish meets MySpace-ish service in which they can view program snippets or new music.

As reported by Rich Seeley in SearchSOA, Chicago Public Radio's Vocalo.org Website, open since the fall, extends the station's presence in the market by offering listeners an online, collaborative experience. Typical programs, which run from three to six minutes, feature interviews with people on the street, music from local artists, discussions of rapid transit, improvisational radio comedy, and high school students talking about gang violence in their neighborhoods.

It's all local user-generated or user-uploaded audio content -- no syndicated or content from other broadcast sources.

Audio content is managed using Drupal, a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in PHP.

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For some companies, SOA may have seemed like a roller coaster. But SOA has played a role in helping companies soar to new heights. Here are more SOA success stories covered throughout 2007 in "SOA in Action."

To keep the planes flying. United Airlines, which reportedly has been working on service-enabling its back-end systems since 2001, decided that the time had come to take the next step with its previously service-enabled mainframes to move to an even more open-standards-based middleware architecture. Over the years, United had built an extensive J2EE-based middleware layer to integrate its large assortment of IBM and Unisys mainframes. The main thrust of the new effort was development of an SOA-enabled system called EasyFIDS, which is a flight information system to track the current status of flights. EasyFIDs is able to relay information about flight status, in real time, to multiple endpoints, including airport monitors, crews at different airports, the Federal Aviation Administration, and most importantly, passengers themselves, who may or may not already have checked in. This calls for a system capable of communicating with a variety of endpoints.

To keep more planes flying. As was the case with United, Scandinavian Airlines International (SAS) embarked on a year-long project to move its operations from home-grown mainframe applications to three new distributed systems that provide real-time messaging. The airline is employing SOA via an enterprise service bus (ESB) messaging backbone that will serve as an intermediate layer of middleware that lets the company map data from disparate systems, route messages, ensure that services are delivered in the correct order and enforce security rules. It is estimated that the migration project will lower IT maintenance costs by $250,000 per month after it goes live -- a potential savings of $3 million a year.

To keeps the trains running. A railroad company set out to build an SOA that could handle 5.8 millions messages a day for 1,500 trading partners, as well as track more than seven million pieces of equipment. Railinc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads, chose to move to SOA to ensure that the right information is sent out to its 1,500 customers. The company moved from its existing legacy EDI system to an SOA-based system. Information can now be accessed anywhere via a PC with a Web browser.

To keep the lines of telecommunications open. BT, the UK-based telecom giant, began its SOA in earnest about three years ago. As a result of the SOA, the company has been able to close down close to 800 systems, and plans to close down another 700 to 900 systems over the coming 12 months. BT's SOA proponents have been able to evolve the company's focus from maintaining operations to concentrating on the customer experience. BT intends to be fully SOA enabled by 2009, Glass said. BT's SOA deployment now covers up to 3,500 core systems, built on 14 platforms. When fully complete by 2009, the transition will make it much easier for BT to build and introduce new products and services for customers by reusing common components – say, customer identification and revenue collection – allowing BT to focus development resources just on new functionality.

To keep the money flowing. Wachovia Bank integrated its front-end services to create a common interface for sales, trading and banking, followed by services for trade execution, positions, offerings and connectivity to markets. Wachovia's CIB unit measures its SOA results with two indicators: time to market and the number of reusable parts. So far, it has experienced about a 40 percent cost avoidance over three years using SOA rather than a traditional technology architecture. “It’s like a roller coaster. You go up and down, throw up a couple times, and at the end of the ride, everything’s great,” said Susan Certoma, CIO of Wachovia Bank.

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From "Pinwheels" to "Seaportals," 2007 saw a wide assortment of innovative SOA solutions across enterprises seeking to untangle their integration issues. In this second part of our wrap-up of 2007 SOA success stories, here are some shining examples.

To consolidate legacy systems. Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica) employed a shared-services CRM system to replaced a tangle of point-to-point connections with a single integration point. The SOA even has a name -- the "Pinwheel."
FCSAmerica's Pinwheel brought together customer data coming out of managed in silos such as a mainframe-based loan accounting system, a third-party CRM system, a custom loan origination system written in Visual Basic, and a Web-based system dealer origination system written in Java.

As an interactive customer portal. Seaport Hotel implemented SOA as part of its new strategy to advance a unified communications platform that enhances the customer experience. Seaport Hotel's in-room "Seaportal" application is built using SOA principles to attain a true IP convergence features. The hotel pulled together VoIP, unified communications, SOA, Web services and external information sources — all with a touch-screen interface for the hotel's guests.

To alleviate double data-entry. Semiconductor testing manufacturer FormFactor Inc. turned to SOA to move away from its outmoded processes that required hand typing information from a legacy manufacturing execution system and then copying the data into its ERP system. The company didn't just decide to drop an SOA into the middle of this configuration. Rather, the company's IT director took a hard look at its business process management before seeing where SOA would fit. SOA would become the enabler for business process automation.

To alleviate manual data entry. Southern States, an agricultural coop, put SOA best practices in place to provide automated updating of price lists across the cooperative's 1,200 retail stores. Previously, pricing data was stored in Oracle’s OneWorld ERP application, a homegrown point-of-sale application and an online catalog and had to be manually updated by store employees. It is estimated that the ability to uniformly update prices has recouped about $1.4 million a year in lost revenues.

To bring together heavy-duty manufacturing systems. Bombardier, a major aerospace company, implemented SOA to address its huge backend integration challenges, which managed to bring 100 interfaces to its SOA layer from all parts of the business. The SOA-based Bombardier Manufacturing Information System brought together eight manufacturing systems resulting in 64 mission-critical real-time interfaces. The company accomplished 100 mission-critical interfaces using 14 protocols, 10 messaging formats across internal and external systems and network topology.

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It's well documented that governments use financial incentives and disincentives (usually through tax policies) to drive public policy. Can this work within large SOA environments? IBM says yes -- and has its own experience with this form of governance to prove it.

Often, SOA programs may become victims of their own success. Business units could go crazy developing services that duplicate or conflict with one another. This was one of the major challenges IBM faced in the early days of its own SOA effort.

According to a new article by SearchSOA's Rich Seeley, IBM first launched its own SOA effort back in 2002, a time when most companies were just starting to figure out Web services. Things started rolling slowly for the first three years as IBM's SOA team experimented with with exploratory services and proofs of concept, said John Falka, chief architect for SOA governance in IBM's internal software group.

By 2005, however, things were hopping. The number of projects grew. However, Falka and his team saw that redundancy of Web service development was becoming an issue. Divisions within IBM were developing their own Web services that performed the same functions as Web services developed by other divisions.

To address this, the team began using something they called service-oriented modeling and architecture (SOMA) to identify Web services that could be reused in new applications. Thus began IBM's first comprehensive SOA governance effort, which employed financial tools to incent or disincent such development. "We provided funding for the single build-out of a service as opposed to the multiple build outs of a service and raised the operational cost benefits of not having redundant services that were generating additional costs," Falka explained.

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In keeping with the theme of this blog and Website, we brought you as many actual working examples of SOA in Action in organizations of all sizes and stripes as we could find. And in 2007, there were more than ever, as SOA hits the mainstream.

Here are but a few classic examples of SOA in Action we saw through the year 2007. More to come!

As a centralized online learning environment:

The State University of New York, which encompasses 64 campuses, 30,000 faculty members, and 414,000 students, brought together disparate registration and e-learning systems into a common environment using SOA techniques. Previously, the university's distance learning program was built on top of a centralized Lotus Notes/Domino system. As the system grew, integration of the distance learning system with other campus systems proved to be a real challenge, particularly with student identity. Each campus had its own student information system (SIS), and students taking both classroom and online courses had to go through a double registration process, resulting in double enrollments.

As a compliance management environment:

USinternetworking, an on-demand hosting provider and AT&T subsidiary, found it challenging to automate or manage business processes around systems audits for its many large clients -- processes which require a lot of paperwork. Often, managers would end up re-keying information from binders of information into separate reporting systems. The company deployed SOA with several components of Oracle Fusion Middleware to capture and leverage the information coming out of these systems into standardized cross-system services. The USinternetworking team also found that compliance mandates are a good way to get support from management for SOA initiatives.

To enhance competitive advantage:

HBA, an insurance carrier, operates in an intensely competitive market, where price makes the difference. HBA is employing SOA-based tools to keep these costs in line over the years to come by repurposing its legacy assets, which represent decades' worth of investment.

To increase business agility:

Marriott is employing services-based applications that can be assembled quickly to respond to changes in the hotel market. The SOA is also intended to provide easier paths to integration with partners, such as Web sites that provide online hotel bookings. The reuse of services would save development costs and get new value out of existing systems.

To improve enterprise search:

Merrill Lynch's Enterprise Data Solutions unit is employing an underlying SOA infrastructure to support an enterprise search and discovery portal. The company developed a single integrated portal, capable of searching 34 million records from nine separate systems.

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What is the connection between enterprise decision management (EDM) and service-oriented architecture? Is there a connection? Should there be a connection?

ebizQ colleague James Taylor, co-author of "Smart (Enough) Systems,", has connected the dots between "smart-enough systems" and service-oriented architecture in a new article, published in SOA Magazine.

This convergence will be seen in the form of "decision services" that will be available as part of SOA. As James puts it, decision services are "applications in your application portfolio or services in your service inventory that automate and manage highly targeted decisions that are part of your organization's day-to-day operation." A decision service can exist "a component or service that answers a business question for other services."

Not only can decision services help in the process of automating decision making, but they also can serve as a "single point of decision making throughout all your systems and processes," James adds. As a result, improvements and enhancements need only be focused on tweaking the specific service or services -- rather than mucking around with the back-end systems in an effort to improve business intelligence. "Decision services can also eliminate the time, cost, and technical risk of trying to reprogram many systems simultaneously to keep up with changing business requirements."

Many industry watchers have been casting about in an effort to identify the "killer application" for SOA -- the business case that will cause executives' eyes to light up and get the to exclaim, 'Aha! So that's how SOA will help us!" I think James Taylor has identified that killer application.

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Let's face it -- say what you want about the pharmaceutical industry -- researching and creating new drugs costs a bundle of money, sometimes billions of dollars.

If you're running a company that has to put up megadollars before a new product can be rolled out, there's a lot of pressure to make the right decisions up front. You need all the information you can get, fast.

Such is the challenge described in a new article by Daniel Eng, manager at Pfizer Global Research and Development. "At Pfizer Global R&D where the company's drug discovery takes place, research scientists and managers require vast amounts of up-to-the-minute information on lab results, submission status, and project schedules to move new research forward quickly. Management must constantly analyze the entire portfolio of new medicines in discovery to look for opportunities, trends, and areas where attention is needed. Researchers and managers strive to bring together the best in ideas, practices, policies as well as the use of information."

Eng says the company turned to a SOA-based strategy to bring data together for analysis in the drug discovery process. The end result was faster delivery of data through "new real-time portals and composite applications that rely heavily on existing data sourced from multiple systems from across the enterprise."

Pfizer appears to be well ahead of the curve in bringing the two disciplines of SOA and data management together. In November, I posted some details about Pfizer's leveraging of master data management (MDM) in combination with SOA to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition. (Explained by Martin Brodbeck, executive director for strategic architecture at Pfizer at the InfoWorld Executive Forum.)

Eng says that prior to service-orienting this process, delivering such data to researchers and managers "has been one of our biggest bottlenecks, adding months and cost to our project timelines." As part of the new drug discovery process, Eng relates, "managers must pull data from sources such as packaged applications, historical data from data warehouses, document repositories, and custom systems. Each source has its own access mechanisms, syntax, and security. Few are structured properly for consumption, let alone reuse. These combined factors slow down new application development projects."

Eng's team was challenged with helping senior management, project team leaders, business analysts, and research scientists across Pfizer's R&D and commercial business units to be able to continuously evaluate the company's portfolio of discovery projects and drugs in development.

The solution was to deploy a portal that can be used across the enterprise that provides access to all pertinent data. Pfizer employs SOA approaches behind the portal environment "to increase reuse of existing components, save development time, and cut costs. So, we strive to use SOA methods and technologies whenever possible," Eng explains.

"We've found that SOA helps break down silo-type data gathering and integration processes by standardizing how data is promoted and reused," Eng relates. The ability to virtualize and abstract via data services helps groups to easily understand and consume data confidently, reliably, and quickly without having to hunt for these sources or rely on manual processes for gathering and integrating them."

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'Pirate SOA -- IT's Secret Weapon' -- that's a good way to describe the gist of the recent panel discussion I hosted with SOA-digerati luminaries Dana Gardner and Phil Wainewright, as part of ebizQ's SOA in Action conference. Complete transcript here, podcast here.)

For many organizations, 'Pirate SOA' may be the only way to get SOA methodologies and sensibilities into their organizations. Management may be too hesitant, or simple too clueless about what SOA can mean for them.

Web 2.0 -- through mashups and SaaS -- introduces rapid, user-driven development and deployment to SOA scenarios. Dana says that a good term to describe the Web 2.0-ish approaches to building out service-oriented architecture is "Guerrilla SOA" -- meaning that "small groups of people, working with lightweight architecture and tools, can accomplish an awful lot when it comes to green field development of services and when it comes to down-and-dirty projects to do integration, compositing and to basically solve the problem of the day on an ad hoc basis."

Of course, as Phil pointed out, the fears around the chaotic and unsupervised nature of Web 2.0-based development and deployment sounds exactly like the fears that surrounded Web services and SOA in its early days. "There was a time when SOA was seen as very emergent and perhaps threatening," he said, pointing out that many people see the result as having been "'just a bunch of Web services' in which people kind of start of do point-to-point Web service integration and perhaps end up with a whole spaghetti mess of uncoordinated, ungoverned SOA, perhaps not worthy of the name architecture. Of course, I think that's the fear around Web 2.0 that because it's emergent and by their nature, emergent technologies are chaotic, uncontrolled, ungovernable, there's this sense that you don't really want them in your nicely cultivated, managed service-oriented architecture in case it kind of ruins the show."

Nevertheless, Dana warned that the rise of the Web 2.0 methodologies -- which provide Web-based platforms at almost no cost -- will seriously disrupt the current marketplace. "The smaller companies that can be capitalized for much less money than in the past, that can start up and go into existing markets and work much more quickly than to help customers or users acquire services and to gain some productivity and business benefit, but without having to drag along the legacy of IT infrastructure -- and to avail themselves of services off the wire increasingly and the ability to host themselves cheaply and such things as what Amazon is providing with Elastic Compute Cloud."

If this scenario plays out, Dana continued, "We have a situation in the marketplace where there's a great deal of disruption from small start-ups that can work in almost like we saw in the 80s with pirates, corporate raiders that would come in and break companies up and sell the parts. It's almost the same notion of a raider or a pirate mentality I would think for small Web 2.0 services-oriented organizations and if that's the case, that's going to compel and force the bigger companies to adopt these sorts of practices."

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Can we really have it all – from SOA to Event Driven Architecture, to Business Intelligence, Business Process Management? That’s the question put forth by ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein at her recent SOA in Action conference panel. (Full transcript here.)

Beth observed, for example, that when it comes to SOA and BPM, “companies are being bombarded with the message that you've got to have it all, and they are confusing messages about how these things relate. …I was rather surprised to hear [IBM vice president] Steve Mills use the terms ‘SOA’ and ‘BPM’ interchangeably, as if they were the same thing…” Plus, Beth said, there’s confusion as to whether EDA is a subset of SOA, or if it should be considered a separate architecture.

Panelists agreed that the relationship between SOA and BPM has always been a difficult one to pin down. And, in many ways, still off in the future. As panelist Derek Miers, CEO of BPM Focus, pointed out, “To be honest, when I put a paper together on the relationship between BPM and SOA a year or so back. I thought I was going to find a lot. And the reality is, I didn't find too many [companies] that were taking that combined BPM-SOA sort of style of approach.”

There are signs that this may be changing, Derek added, noting that there are ways SOA and BPM complement each other. “In a sense, SOA is like a best practice design principle,” he explained. “And if you look inside a lot of the BPM case studies, you'll find people applying business practices and principles that incorporate SOA-type functionality.” However, he adds, “I'm not sure I've seen a SOA case study that talks to the BPM end of the spectrum either.”

Instead, SOA-BPM efforts tend to fall within a “spectrum of activity,” he says. “Certainly, one can find plenty of cases that have services-oriented components within them. But did they set out to do a SOA architecture to begin with, or did they set out really to organize and solve some significant business problem with a business process related issue?”

Panelists agreed there is a developing synergy between the various trends coming together – SOA, EDA, and BPM. “I think that what we're seeing… today in convergence is really the result of an evolution that had taken place within the industry with the types of technologies that are available, systems that are available,” said JT Taylor, CTO of iWay Software. “The solutions that are being built for customers by combining different technologies, different types of underlying Middleware products, BPM suites, BI tools, into an overall solution that's really geared towards the true operational business processes of an organization. And really combining all these tools to support that.”

Lyndsay Wise of Wise Analytics agreed that she has little working examples yet of companies pulling together SOA and BPM within a common effort. For business intelligence applications to operate successfully, however, such convergence is important. “SOA becomes a key piece in terms of BI moving across the organization and being placed on top of different ERP, SCMs or CRM systems, in order to really have these solution interoperate and really integrate and converge with one another.”

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