SOA in Action

SOA is hot and getting hotter. And if the economy cooled, SOA will get even hotter.

That's the latest prognosis from Forrester Research, found in its recent SOA adoption survey, the third since 2005. (Reported here by SearchSOA's Rich Seeley.) Randy Heffner, vice president at Forrester, notes that whole SOA was plodding along in 2006, the approach took off dramatically in 2007:

"In 2005, the survey found 53 percent of enterprises were 'using or planning to use SOA.' By 2006, that number had grown to 62 percent, and in 2007 it reached 66 percent. More importantly for the theme of the latest survey, enterprises with an 'enterprise level strategy and commitment to SOA' went from 18 percent in 2005, to 22 percent in 2006, and 26 percent in 2007."

Will this support and interest in SOA continue through 2008, even if the economy turns more sluggish? Heffner says not only will SOA survive, but it will thrive. It's possible that tighter IT budgets may actually spur further SOA adoption, he said. "There are conditions under budget stress that actually encourage the use of SOA," he said. "For example, one benefit of SOA is that it extends the life of legacy applications. Say we were going to rewrite this application and spend $X millions, but we figured out we didn't have to because with a fourth of the money we could get where we needed to by SOA-enabling a legacy application."

Above and beyond cost cutting, organizations have been embracing SOA for business reasons, Forrester concludes. "The major theme is the growing recognition of SOA as an important enabler for strategic business transformation," Heffner said in an interview with SearchSOA.com.

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Posted by joemckendrick in SOA Research and Analyst Reports  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague here at ebizQ, recently hosted an extremely compelling online panel discussion on the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0. Beth was joined by luminaries including Dion Hinchcliffe, whom I would consider the leading analyst in the Web 2.0 realm, ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer, and Doug Wilson, CTO of portals and collaboration products at IBM. (A full transcript is posted here.)

The discussion was refreshingly straightforward. Doug Wilson even came out and said that SOA can be pretty "boring," as in "SOA is kind of a boring thing if the end user can't interact in some way with the service oriented architecture. If they can't avail themselves of the capabilities, and they can't drive the compositional nature of that."

As explored in this blogsite, SOA has been delivering plenty of success stories. But how often is your latest SOA project the subject of chats at weekend parties? Conversely, there's been a stampede to Web 2.0. And, Web 2.0 probably is a subject brought up at parties. And people's eyes don't even glaze over.

The question is, how can we capture just a piece of this enthusiasm and apply it to SOA? The fact of the matter is, as expressed by the panelists, Web 2.0 may ultimately be SOA's savior. Some experts say that the lightweight, user-friendly techniques seen in the Web 2.0 experience can serve as SOA's best selling tool. Some even say that eventually, the two worlds may even blend to the point where they are indistinguishable.

Doug Wilson pointed out that "it's not always obvious for people to see the connection" between SOA and Web 2.0. However, at the end of the day, aspects of Web 2.0, such as mashups, "are the juxtaposition or combination of information from multiple back end services. In fact, mashups are a compositional mechanism by which an end user or programmer can bring multiple sources of information or transactions to bear on one problem. This goes right to the heart of SOA and SOA composition." Doug also stated that enabling users to easily compose services that make calls to back-end systems will go a long way to helping businesses see the value in SOA.

Dion provided a good working definition of what Web 2.0 is all about:

"Defining Web 2.0 can be a challenge because it represents a number of significant but very interrelated trends. The simple nontechnical definition is that it's 'Networked applications that leverage network effects.' What we're really talking about is software and communities that get smarter the more people participate in them."

Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise:

"AOL rolled out...a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web... it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms."

For some, SOA may meld into Web 2.0, and the result will be a global SOA, with various islands comprised of enterprise SOAs. Dion Hinchcliffe put it this way: "Look at the Web as it is today -- it has now become the world's largest service oriented architecture. Over 600 companies have opened their business up as Web services."

However, currently, the tools and protocols being used for Web 2.0 engagements are "not what we're using in the enterprise," Dion observed. "We're seeing this rise to Web oriented architecture that's happening outside our organization -- they're using REST instead of SOAP."

Will Web 2.0-style approaches eventually permeate through enterprise walls? It's inevitable, Dion continued. Web 2.0 is "leading to a realignment in the way we look at SOA. When I talk to many SOA architects, they're trying to figure out where this fits in. We are seeing some differences and some changes to the way we might want to do things on the infrastructure side."

Ron Schmelzer pointed out that it this point, they are separate efforts -- "companies are still trying to understand SOA and Web 2.0 on their own. However, he added, both business and IT are recognizing that enterprise systems, applications, and data need to be less stodgy. "When we go home and we're away from out offices, and we use the Net, and we use the latest experiences -- Google, YouTube, blogs -- we're experiencing the broad movement to Web 2.0 as part of our general computer using experience. And then we go back to our office... where we're faced mostly with technology that's still in the 90s."

"There's a lot of desire, especially among the folks in IT, to Bridge the gap," he said. "The vector, the movement... is toward this more holistic, architectural loosely coupled user-empowered style of IT -- and away from a central architecture trying to fit everything into a set of homogeneous set of systems that are tough to integrate with."

However, Ron pointed out that Web services and SOA are two very different things, meant to serve different purposes:

"The concept of SOA actually predates Web services by at least five or six years. The main proponents of service oriented architecture at that time created architecture around CORBA. The use of Web services technology is only appropriate for certain circumstances; it's not appropriate for all uses of service oriented architecture. For example, I wouldn't want a mobile device sitting on a network consuming heavy Web service and protocols."

Web 2.0 and SOA also have different philosophies, Ron added. "SOA is about empowering the enterprise, and Web 2.0 is about empowering the individual," he said. "The ideas of Web 20 and SOA are definitively different. They espouse different ideas. SOA is primarily architectural, which means it's an approach a methodology a style and a design. Web 2.0 is a broad-based movement that covers a variety of topics."

In combination, however, Web 2.0 and SOA are a power to be reckoned with. "We want the user to become increasingly more familiar with in the broad Internet, and bring that experience into the enterprise," Ron said. "At the same time, allowing the enterprise to free up its assets, and empower the business user."

The complete panel Webcast can be found here. A full transcript is posted Posted by joemckendrick in Enterprise 2.0 • SOA • SOA Events • Software as a Service  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

EbizQ has just posted a transcript of my recent Webcast with IBM's Leif Davidson is now available for perusal.

Some highlights of our discussion:

Leif Davidson on how SOA always starts off with good intentions, but...

"The past history of the whole IT business has shown what happens when there is no control, you know, as we talked about earlier in terms of creating rat’s nest. Everybody, you know, no one comes in with the intention of how can I make things more complicated and less flexible. Everyone starts off with good intentions and, you know, an SOA project whether it’s done by one team or, you know, 21 teams in a business could be done with the best intentions but could end up the with a mess."

"And I think SOA’s particularly that way if you think about what it actually means in the business sense; these composite applications, invoking services from across and beyond your business. If you don’t actually have control from the very early days of SOA, you’ve now got a much more dynamic flexible business and much more dynamic and flexible access across your business to your IT. If you don’t have that sort of sense of control and ownership and governance its probably the right word, then I think you do risk much more than in a traditional IT infrastructure."

Yours truly on impending SOA growth:

"We find [in our survey of 244 companies] that organizations are really ramping up their SOA initiatives. There’s going to be a lot of steady growth for SOA. We actually looked at companies -- we actually looked at the number of services, the number of enterprise services being shared or reused. They intend to deploy large numbers of services. By next year this time, according to what our respondents are telling us, those companies with more than 25 services will jump dramatically, the percentage of companies from 24% to 39% over the next 12 months."

"The growth -- this growth in businesses that are crossing this threshold into multiple critical mass of services, 25 or more services is a significant number because once they cross this threshold they need to start treating SOA as a critical strategy and need to address -- start addressing many aspects, the management, and policy enforcement aspects, for example. Connecting up their mission critical services becomes an important priority."

Leif on federated ESBs:

"A Federated ESB is really a logical step from what we’ve talking about having separate ESB’s to meet different departmental and project needs. As you see on this chart any different department may have its own ESB but that doesn’t actually get away from the needs for all of those ESBs to deliver common capabilities but by the integration across different departments. And so the Federated ESBs really allowing businesses to select multiple different ESBs but allowing them to work together to provide common capabilities across that disparate infrastructure.

Click here for the Webcast; here for the transcript.

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Yes, as we've been preaching incessantly on these pages for the past couple of years, governance does make the difference between SOA success and ending up with Just a Bunch of Web Services, or JBOWS.

In a new ComputerWorld report, Carphone Warehouse, a mobile phone retailer based in the UK, credits a new design-time governance system with boosting the adoption of its SOA effort, now in its third year.

The company was experiencing many of the issues that occur with JBOWS architectures, such as creating duplicate services, and resorting to time-consuming manual checks of services. More than half of the service designs were not in compliance with corporate standards.

The company recently acted to remedy the duplication and confusion by putting an automated governance system in place. Right away, things started falling in place. For starters, 95 percent of the service designs now being put into production conform to governance standards, according to Pawel Maszczyk, enterprise architect at Carphone Warehouse.

Even better, the article relates, by avoiding accidental duplication of services, the automated governance system (from HP Systinet) is projected to deliver savings of £526,000 over three years. Another £93,750 will come from time saved managing governance, and £113,500 from time saved reviewing services. That's a total of £733,000, or the equivalent of US$1.5 million at the current exchange rate.

“We gained visibility. If you’re looking for a service that does something in particular, you can identify it and reuse it quickly," according to Maszczyk. “It also automates processes, so we know if there is a change to approve. Before, we had to go and find out if there was something that we needed to do. It automatically carries out mundane checks so we can launch new services more quickly.”

The company plans to put automated runtime governance in place as its next goal.

As always, Maszczyk pointed out, the organizational issues are the most vexing in moving SOA forward. Adopting SOA also means adopting a new “mentality” on IT, he said. “It’s not an easy change. You have to explain what you’re trying to achieve."

If the organization sees SOA evolving rather than JBOWS, it's much more likely to sign on to the effort -- perhaps even with greater enthusiasm.

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There's no such thing as a single enterprise SOA. At least not yet.

I just had the opportunity to co-present a Webinar with IBM's Leif Davidson on the topic of "Identifying and Federating Today's SOA Power Centers," in which we explored the results of a recent ebizQ survey of 244 companies.

The survey finds that there's no question that enterprises are firmly committed to service oriented architecture as a strategy going forward - and they're willing to put budget dollars into the endeavor.

But the survey also shows that there's no such thing as a single, all-encompassing SOA effort that covers every service initiative from every corner of the enterprise. Rather, most SOA or enterprise service efforts are "islands" of integration that arise within individual business units, designed to address specific problems.

The challenge is that these separate SOA efforts have different formats and technology foundations under development or implemented within their walls. Many use application servers to support enterprise services, others leverage composite applications on middleware, and others rely on enterprise service buses. In fact, the survey showed that enterprises are taking multiple approaches to building and supporting SOA, including application servers, composite middleware, and enterprise service buses.

The survey also found that most of these service deployments aren't yet interfacing with mission-critical systems. But this is changing rapidly, as the number of services designed for reuse proliferate. The survey finds steady, unrelenting growth in organizations maintaining large volumes of SOA-based services - the number with more than 100 services in production is expected to double.

The bottom line is that there is no single approach to SOA. SOA requires a mix of solutions but the eventual result should be a more reliable, simple and flexible infrastructure and business.

There are two interconnected levels to addressing the problem. First, on a technology level, is federation. One out of four companies have already moved to a federated infrastructure to support multiple instances of ESBs or intermediaries. The survey also shows that those with federated infrastructures are more likely to be able to move from siloed SOA to enterprise-scale SOA.

Then, on a business level, there's governance. Effective governance will make the difference between ending up with a tangle of services -- JBOWS -- or a functioning SOA that truly supports business endeavors at any endpoint across the enterprise. The survey finds that organizations recognize the urgency of governance, but a surprisingly large percentage leave this up to the IT department.

The Webinar in which Leif and I discuss the implications of the survey results can be found here at the ebizQ site. (Registration required.)

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Posted by joemckendrick in Management • SOA • SOA Events • SOA Research and Analyst Reports • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

One of the interesting findings to come out of our recent survey on Enterprise SOA is the mixed state of governance that still exists out there. While a third do have a board or committee to oversee governance, another 16% rely on a "center of excellence" to manage the process and gain business buy-in.

What advantage does governance provide to SOA, besides acting as a central clearinghouse for vetting services? For one, governance boards or centers of excellence assure that projects are put into motion based on their merit to the organization, versus individual political agendas. This helps keep SOA decisions above the political fray.

As reported in Application Development Trends, Ian Koenig, senior vice president and chief architect at Thomson Financial, recently spoke on the importance of SOA governance. Koenig provided these key lessons learned about SOA governance:

Lesson Learned: Choose Policies That Matter, or Risk 'Death by Governance': "Having too many policies is just as bad as having none at all," Koenig said. He said his team looked at 5,000 really good ideas and then distilled them down to 170 policies that really mattered.

Lesson Learned: People Don't Communicate: Often, people don;t even see eye to eye on what problems they're trying to solve. "When two or more smart people disagree on a solution, it's almost always true that they don't agree on the problem they are trying to solve," Koenig said. His team employed the UML 2.0 specification to diagram how data should flow.

Make Governance Easy and Do It Early: Here's how people react to complexity, Koenig said: "Sixty percent will do the easy thing, regardless of whether it's right; 40 percent will do the right thing, regardless of whether it's the easy thing to do." The key is to make governance as simple as automatic as possible -- and automation is the best route.

Lesson Learned: Reusability Is Not Cheap: Koenig said reuse is expensive: "Our rough calculation is it's about 2.5 times more expensive to make something reusable as not." Therefore, it's going to take some customer education to sell the idea of putting more funds in up front for an integration project.

Identify an Owner for Each Service: "It's important to identify who defines the value proposition for the service," Koenig said. You need to know "who gets called at 3:00 in the morning if it's not meeting its SLAs."

Fair enough.

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Posted by joemckendrick in SOA • SOA Events • SOA Research and Analyst Reports  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

By now, we're familiar with the promises of loose coupling and flexibility SOA is intended to bring to corporate systems. Now, the move is on to extend SOA beyond the firewall and enable business partners or outsourcers to access and share services.

In a new article, Jack van Hoof explains that when a company outsources parts of its processes (and who doesn't these days), standard SOA may nt be appropriate. Instead, the way to go may be Event-Driven Architecture, or EDA.

The "synchronous command-and-control nature of SOA is a way of tightly coupling application components which doesn’t allow for this kind of flexibility," he explained. "SOA may be loosely coupled in the technical domain, where common Web services technology is used, but it certainly is not in the functional domain where SOA is associated with ‘calling’ foreign (reusable) services and eliminating data redundancy."

The problem with SOA, he says, is "the availability of services and stored data can be vanished after an act of outsourcing, which may lead to costly consequences and high risks. This has all to do with creating dependencies with SOA. The promise of SOA delivering loose coupling, which typically is asynchronous, could at the functional level be stated as a false promise."

EDA helps "achieve loose coupling and autonomy" in these multi-enterprise settings, van Hoof writes. "In contrast to SOA, EDA provides a way of loose coupling. EDA is not a synchronous command-and-control type of pattern, but just the contrary: an asynchronous publish-and-subscribe type of pattern. The publisher is completely unaware of the subscriber and vice versa; components are loosely coupled in the sense that they only share the semantics of the message."

"If you are seeking to support strong cohesion in the business processes, situations where all process steps are under one control, SOA is the way to go," said van Hoof. "If you are seeking to support independency between business process steps, EDA is the way to go."

Since SOA (as we know it today) first came on the scene five years ago, the emphasis has been on employing it as a methodology for integration of disparate enterprise applications. Now, companies are looking to establish clusters of SOAs that extend beyond their enterprises to those of operational partners. This means SOA should no longer be treated as just another IT network.

Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone is talking about "SOA governance" these days, but what does it all really mean?

At what stage are most SOA governance programs at? What are organizations trying to accomplish with these efforts? How are policies enforced? Are companies tracking reuse? Are companies employing automated enforcement, or is this still a pipe dream?

ebizQ is conducting a new survey to answer these questions and more, to better gauge where companies are at with efforts to better manage and govern their SOA deployments.

Forty iPod Shuffles will be given away to survey respondents in a drawing, to thank you for your input into the brief questionnaire. In addition, you will also receive a copy of the survey results, which will help you assess where your company stands in relation to others in managing and governing SOA.

The survey, which only takes a few minutes to complete, is posted here at ebizQ. Hurry, the deadline for responses is this Friday, March 14.

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For years, the disciplines of enterprise integration -- followed by SOA -- have always been perceived as "hard and techie." This has made discussions with the business process management (BPM) side of the house difficult.

Now, thanks to the introduction of new lightweight approaches via Web 2.0, SOA, BPM, and integration are now becoming more flexible, user-driven methodologies.

David Linthicum recently spoke with Dr. Dale Skeen, founder of Vitria, a well-established integration vendor, about this shift. (The podcast is here, and a transcript of Dave's discussion with Dale Skeen is available for viewing here.)

This is part of SOA moving into its next generation -- "the next great leap going together is really leveraging three very important technologies in the enterprise -- SOA, BPM and Web 2.0," Dale said. While these three areas are seen as separate technologies or methodologies, Dales sees their inevitable convergence into what he calls an "enterprise platform."

First of all, Dale said, SOA and BPM have always been a natural pairing. "SOA is an enabler that allows you to access business functions, and services, and data universally. BPM is a higher level that orchestrates these business services and human interactions in ways that allow you to meet a business objective. So hence, I've always considered these to be the perfect complementary technologies to work together."

Now, Web 2.0 is bringing SOA-BPM closer to the end user, Dale said. "SOA brings this universal access to services and data through the SOA enablement tools. It does in a secure, manageable, and governed fashion. Now, Web 2.0 brings rich internet interfaces, rich user experiences based on technology such as AJAX and Flex, which are universally available in your Web browser."

"Application integration is hard, and very techie. Web 2.0 allows this notion of mashups where you let users sort of integrate in a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-do fashion."

These are all new trends that are shifting IT empowerment to the business end user, Dale added. "Simple things like mashups, we're talking visual layering of information, we're talking about collaboration technologies such as instant messaging. All of these have a role in enterprise software. And actually, the introduction of that can be very exciting for both the IT and the business side."

IT professionals need not fret over this shift, however, Dale said. "It means that IT will be able to do faster technology upgrades because of that, they have more control over the server aspect of it, and the client side they don't have to worry about. They're going to be able to lower the support costs and it also brings fundamentally new deployment models such as Software-as-a-service, which we think, is going to be a fundamental part of business IT going forward."

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Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management • Data Management • Enterprise 2.0 • Management • SOA • SOA Podcasts • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

This Wednesday the 12th, IBM's Leif Davidsen and I will be delivering the results of and commentary around ebizQ's latest survey results on SOA and trends toward ESB federation. (To sign up for the Webinar, click here.)

To help build the conversation that will be taking place within the Webinar, we invite you to join in with any questions or observations you may have.

One inquiry focused on the viability of Web Services Description Language, or WSDL,in a federated environment. Would exposing ESBs as a WSDL be sufficient to link different vendors' ESBs together?

Leif responds that while WSDL can help make the connection, but more is required for a robust SOA infrastructure across business units. "To make the most out of an SOA infrastructure, resources should be used and reused across the business. This will drive the connection of these ESBs to provide end-to-end seamless connectivity," he said.

"From a purely functional point-of-view a service provider and consumer can connect using a WSDL interface. But when looking at the business perspective, important issues such as Governance, Security, Transactionality and Systems Management come into view. In order to invoke the services through a WSDL interface, the service needs to be located. If it exists in a remote system, the security credentials need to be passed along. Updates to transactions add to the complexity and criticality. And of course not every asset is exposed as a Web Service."

"So while WSDL maybe a part of the solution for connecting web services through different ESBs, there are many other aspects to consider other than simple web services connectivity that will be important to businesses when considering the implications of actual deployment."

Join us Wednesday an Noon Eastern Time for the latest data and solutions in managing multiple SOA implementations in our Webinar, Identifying and Federating Today's SOA Power Centers Through Enterprise Service Buses.

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Lately, many pundits and trade publications have been fretting whether service-oriented architecture is catching on, or if it's still a dream trapped within the IT silo.

A new survey ebizQ conducted in conjunction with IBM finds SOA is gaining traction across the enterprise. However, the challenge is that there may be many separate SOA efforts going on under one roof. Can these separate efforts be brought together, to properly fulfill the vision of SOA? (Less complexity, more simplicity, outside of the silos.)

The survey of 244 companies found that organizations are firmly committed to SOA as a strategy going forward - and they're willing to put budget dollars into the endeavor.

However, in most cases, SOA is not one effort that an enterprise launches, but a series of initiatives that arise to address different challenges within different business units. There's no such thing as a single, all-encompassing SOA effort that covers every service initiative from every corner of the enterprise.

Enterprises are taking multiple approaches to building and supporting SOA, including application servers, composite middleware, and enterprise service buses. One out of four companies have moved to a federated infrastructure to support multiple instances of ESBs or intermediaries. Those with federated structures are more likely to be able to move from siloed SOA to enterprise-scale SOA.

On Wednesday, May 12, I will be teaming up with Leif Davidsen, worldwide content lead for SOA reuse and connectivity marketing at IBM, in Webinar to talk about the results of this landmark survey, as well as cover solutions that address the need to better integrate scattered SOA initiatives. All participants will receive a copy of the survey results.

For information and access to the Webinar, click here. We hope you will join us.

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