SOA in Action

Does your SOA initiative remind you more of the gunslinging, saloon-brawling days of the Wild West than of the intrepid pioneers?

Don't feel bad -- most companies are still struggling to tame their Wild West SOA frontiers. The right approaches and solutions can help keep rogue services at bay, while delivering greater value from reusable assets.

I will be joining Christian Hastedt Marckwardt, solution marketing director with SAP, on Tuesday, April 29, at Noon Eastern Time in a special Webinar to discuss the results of a new ebizQ-SAP survey on SOA governance trends and practices.

The survey explored the depth of SOA and SOA governance at organizations. Be sure to join us for a compelling hour, as well as receive a complimentary copy of the complete survey results!

______________________________________________________________________

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

There's been quote a bit of discussion raging across the blogosphere as of late around the emerging concept of WOA, or Web Oriented Architecture, that may represent the the next phase of evolution of service oriented architecture.

Essentially, WOA is another way of describing the application of the Web 2.0-style technologies and methodologies, such as Ajax, REST, and Software as a Service, to enterprise requirements. Put another way, it's running an enterprise from the Cloud, versus onsite servers, hardware, and software.

Many observers are groaning at the introduction of yet another Three Letter Acronym to our already TLA-burdened lexicon. (See Mike Meehan's post here, and Dana Gardner's post here.) Apparently, many IT architects and practitioners are also rolling their eyes at this one.

However, the WOA phenomenon is something to pause and think about in terms of its long-term (and short-term, for that matter) implications for SOA.

Dion Hinchcliffe, the leading thinker in all things WOA, says that there's no reason why much of the internal enterprise functionality we look to in SOA can't be shifted to the Cloud. In fact, WOA leverages the World Wide Web, which Dion describes as “the largest SOA presently in existence.” The services that are built for WOA are built from lightweight Web 2.0 standards and methodologies, especially REST and enterprise mashups. He also describes enterprise-based SOA as “local networks.”

Dion notes that “both approaches leverage HTTP, self-describing data formats such as XML, are concerned about the use of open standards, and can be used to build systems of arbitrary complexity.” However, while SOAs “tend to have a small and well-defined set of endpoints through which many types of data and data instances can pass, WOAs tend to have a very large and open-ended number of endpoints; one for each individual resource. Not an endpoint for each type of resource, but a URI-identified endpoint for each and every resource instance.”

He also observes that while “SOA was designed from the top-down by vendors to be tool friendly, WOA was emerged form the bottom up from the Web naturally, and has the best support in simple procedural code and an XML parser.” Plus, very importantly, while “traditional SOA is fairly cumbersome to consume in the browser and in mashups, WOA is extremely easy to consume just about anywhere.”

In a recent email exchange with a group of us analysts who have been debating the merits of creating another TLA, Dion defended the WOA designation, noting that it needs to be set apart from standard SOA approaches:

"WOA simply reflects the set of emergent network and application architectures that are working today on a large scale on the Web, getting results for a great many organizations by using slightly different techniques and a fairly different mindset than we've used in SOA. This has become increasingly evident in the many WOA success stories over the last half decade that are producing pretty darn dramatic ROI numbers for many businesses large and small (happy to share these)."

SOA as we've known it has just been too cumbersome and complicated, Dion said. "I spent five years building SOAs from 2001-2006 and have been appalled at the cost/benefit ratio."

He notes that the simpler, more rapidly deployable model that WOA offers an incomparable value proposition to slowa-SOA. "Global SOA on the Internet is producing impressive results today with WOA techniques and a quick survey of Programmable Web's hundreds of WOA-style APIs or WidgetBox/Google Gadgets can demonstrate it has already greatly surpassed our traditional SOA models in terms of industry adoption, at least on the biggest network there is. It's the local SOAs in our enterprises that are the ones having the problems."

_____________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in Enterprise 2.0 • SOA • Software as a Service  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Talk about legacy. Up until recently, both Lufthansa and United Airlines were using a 40-year old reservation system, written in Assembly language.

Esther Schnidler, writing in CIO, describes how the airline migrated its green-screen-based system, which couldn't integrate with other systems and services.

Migrating the system to SOA, which covers the product suite for reservations, inventory and passenger check-in, is equivalent to a "heart transplant," said Shama Patel, business program manager of the SOA effort for United and Lufthansa, called Horizon Project.

The key to the project's success is good governance, Patel said. Along with a governance board supported by both airlines, a "Guidance Coalition" which brings IT and business employees together to interact and work on project milestones together. United also created a job title of "business engagement manager" to act as a point of contact between the IT project and the division.

Eventually, Lufthansa and United plan to roll out a common platform that can also be used by other members of the Star Alliance. "The modernization project will impact 20,000 people in 350 locations in a three- to four-year time frame, and it will touch 20 company divisions."

____________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in Case Study • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

There's been quite a bit of debate in the industry about whether SOA can deliver reasonable ROI within a reasonable timeframe. The consensus has been that it's going to take time, even years, for the benefits of SOA to take effect.

However, there are exceptions to every piece of accepted conventional wisdom. In the case of mergers and acquisitions, the payback from service-oriented architecture sometimes can be seen in a matter of months.

Tony Baer, who also an ebizQ contributor, has just posted this account at Manufacturing Business Technology, describing how a recent acquisition doubled Mohawk Fine Papers' manufacturing network doubled to six sites, and distribution network quadrupled to four warehouses.

From past experience, Mohawk's IT team knew how painful custom development and integration could be. As Paul Stamas, Mohawk's VP of IT, told Tony: "The biggest problem was managing all the interfaces. The failures in the previous integration were point-to-point connections that nobody owned." So Mohawk took a new tact -- SOA.

The company integrated its existing BPCS enterprise system with the Infor ShipLogix transportation management solution deployed recently to replace an older Logility application. And with a much larger production network, Mohawk also sought to tie BPCS into its Infor Datastream enterprise asset management system. (Note: BPCS was created and marketed by SSA Global, which was purchased by Infor in 2006. But just because a vendor is acquired doesn't make it any easier for a company to integrate the separate products.)

_____________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in Case Study • Management • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, works with a lot of organizations that are starting their SOA journeys, and noticed that many make the same mistake: they spend all their time worry about the technical details of their implementations, but don't pay enough attention to governance.

In a new post here at ebizQ, Dave outlined what he sees as the five greatest mistakes in SOA governance:

1-Decentralizing common artifacts: "When common artifacts such as WSDLs, schemas or configs are scattered in various locations, organizations waste time searching for interfaces and schemas," Dave says. "This is because they lack a central authority for the published service interface, which discourages discovery and reuse across an enterprise."

2-Reinventing the wheel: Perhaps the biggest problem SOA was meant to correct. "Services and applications are often written again and again to perform the same function," Dave says. "As a result, many different versions of the same artifact are built and integrated, increasing development times and creating a huge maintenance cost burden." The solution is a centralized repository or registry available to the enterprise.

3-Hoping for best practices: "Developers may not inherently know best practices, and even if they do, they may not follow them every time," Dave says. Best practices can and should be enforced as enterprise-wide policies, anywhere from the build to the registry to people and processes.

4-Forgetting about service consumers: It is important to continuously be aware of how a service is being used by the final consumer at the end of the process, Dave says. He recommends adopting tools that track dependency management.

5-Inconsistent application deployment strategy: "Many application deployment strategies are ad-hoc, not well documented, and only understood by one person," Dave says. A registry and repository can help automate developer actions, and thus ensure consistency.

How far along are most organizations with their SOA governance? ebizQ recently conducted a survey on SOA governance trends, and I will be joining Christian Hastedt Marckwardt, solution marketing director with SAP, on Tuesday, April 29, at Noon Eastern Time in a special Webinar to discuss the survey results and implications. Be sure to join us for a compelling hour, as well as receive a complimentary copy of the complete survey results!

______________________________________________________________________

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

According to a report in ComputerWeekly, consumer goods company Proctor & Gamble is working on an ambitious service oriented architecture that will provide aggregated data for the company's 32,000 managers.

To accomplish this, the company will be re-using up to half of its internally developed code across the organization, which will be made available as shared services across the enterprise.

The company has already rolled out SOA to 2,000 users, helping to achieve up to 25% of reuse, Terry McFadden, associate director for enterprise architecture at P&G.

_____________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in Case Study • Management • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

There's been a lot of debate and discussion across the industry as to whether SOA can deliver value to the business early on, or if its more of a long-term process.

For one company working with SOA methodologies for the past 10 years, there clearly has been a long-term benefit, in terms of economies of scale. The earliest services may have not been more cost effective than standard applications, but as SOA and reuse grew, these services grew cheaper and cheaper to use and administer.

Then again, a $5 billion logistics and trucking company ought to know plenty about economies of scale. It may cost $1,000 to ship one refrigerator from New York to Los Angeles, but cost a penny if it's intelligently bundled with another shipment. Why not apply this know-how to its information technology infrastructure?

One of the best and earliest examples of heavy-duty implementations of Web services and SOA is Con-Way Inc., a logistics and trucking company. I first spoke with them and documented their efforts back in late 2004. At the time, Con-Way had already been evolving an SOA infrastructure for several years, enabling its seven separate business units to share standardized customer-facing applications. At that time, Con-Way had about 20 coarse-grain business components, such as a shipment component, purchasing component, and customer component.

SearchSOA's Rich Seeley just spoke with the folks at Con-Way, and, needless to say, the company has come a long way since 2004. For one, revenues at the freight transportation company were only making a measly $2 billion when I last spoke with them.

Shibashis Mukherjee, Con-Way lead enterprise architect, told Rich how things came about, dating back to the 1990s, when the company embarked on a component-based methodology to expose COBOL mainframe applications as services. The company began building various Web services earlier this decade.

Con-Way set out not knowing how much services would be reused -- but this was very much their design goal. . "When we built services at that point in time, we built every piece of functionality as a reusable piece of code," Mukherjee said. "We had no idea whether it was going to be reused or not." However, reuse across the company's various business lines took off.

The result was a multiplier effect as SOA gradually took hold in the corporate culture. "It took a couple of projects to see all the benefits," Mukherjee said. "You don't generally see the benefits in the first project you do. We also had executive management buy-in and we had a long-term vision. So as project after project is done, our development time was cut as we reused components built by the previous projects."

______________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in Case Study • Management • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Business-IT alignment... Has a day gone by over the past ten years that we have not heard that phrase?

While it seems to be a constant but elusive dream -- like peace on Earth -- some companies indicate that SOA may be moving them closer to reality.

Fellow ebizQ colleague James Taylor, out at the IBM Impact confab this week, provides an account of an end-user customer panel on the ever-vexing challenge of business-IT alignment. Is service-oriented architecture helping to bring about some of this alignment?

A panel of corporate practitioners talked about their SOA efforts, and the impact SOA was having on alignment -- a positive impact, by the way. James reports that Randy Wallace from Michelin said one of his company's biggest challenges is "B2B with lots of billers to interface directly in their order management systems so, for instance, allow dealers to integrate orders with Michelin. They are currently evolving their order-to-cash system using Process Server and SOA."

Who much alignment has Michelin seen? According to Wallace, the company has come a long way, "from having a very small percentage of IT spend aligned with key business goals (6%) to one that is much more so (81%)."

That's pretty impressive. Wallace cited some examples: "For instance, in the past business units in different regions picked i2 and Manugistics at the same time and both were implemented resulting in separate systems. A stronger governance process and overall architecture are now established, driven by business ambitions and regularly updated. Far fewer and more focused projects as a result. Senior executive user satisfaction has risen steadily."

Austin Waldron from Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC) said his company's "focus is on using SOA in legacy modernization where many disparate systems are being replaced by a unified set of shared services. The governance issues seem to have been key for HCSC."

Waldron also talked about moving closer to business-IT alignment. "They had some years of IT spend focused more on basic IT infrastructure (security, robustness etc) but now investments much more driven by the business strategy."

Another panalist talked about more alignment at the front lines of the business. Jeff Auker from The Hartford "talked about challenge of consumer front-ends. Consumers working directly with The Hartford now expect a much more interactive online experience for sales and service - this is being driven by GEICO and Progressive’s campaigns. SOA is key because they have some front-ends that are tightly integrated with very old back-ends and SOA let’s them decouple them."

Thanks again to James Taylor for this report .

______________________________________________________________________

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

I recently had the opportunity to host an ebizQ Webinar on managing SOA performance with Forrester's Randy Heffner and AmberPoint's Ed Horst.

SOA has a lot of moving parts, and digging down to spot the root cause of a service problem is not always easy. SOAs are multilayered creatures. Is it the service itself that's creating an issue? Is it the database? Is it one of the servers?

As Randy put it:

"We’re talking about managing complex SOA services. So we’re diving into an advanced topic that comes up as you realize how deep your service implementations can go, and as you realize some of the dependencies that happen between the various components behind the implementation of your service. Your SOA management solution however you construct it and buy it must handle SOA-based service requests that have complex service implementations."

Randy says when troubles arise with services in SOA, it's often a challenge to pinpoint the source of the troubles, and a number of teams may get involved in the process of identifying issues -- and not have the big picture. Now, Heffner says, "great, we’ve identified there’s a problem with a service, who we going to call?" With complex SOA implementation, and multiple teams, the only answer that will be coming from everyone within their respective teams saying, "it's not me -- my stuff is working fine." That's because everyone has a view limited to their piece of the infrastructure, Randy says.

SOA management tools need to address "deep service" management, Randy pointed out. SOA management tools all do a fairly good job of altering administrators to problems with a service. Even in a complex service implementation -- it could be Java, .NET, messaging middleware, or legacy connectors -- when trouble is afoot, a good management tool will do a good job of sending an alert out.

Randy urges configuring SOA management strategies and solutions to conduct "deep service management." Typically, SOA management solutions employ solutions that don't look beyond the SOAP interface. A new generation of tools that are emerging, however, that can look beyond the service interface to the databases, services, and messaging layers beneath.

SOA management should be able to handle a variety of SOA deployments, ranging from services that invoke Java Message Service, MSMQ, Java RMKI, or CORBA, to ESBs or app servers. Many deep service SOA management approaches can start with agents that many SOA management solutions provides, Heffner said. Then, there are also an increasing number of management solutions that run natively on various platforms.

They key is to employ these solutions -- with or without agents -- to gain better visibility into the systems behind the services, he said. "SOA management solutions may have various ways to construct or correlate a picture, such as dropping tags into a message... or, you might have to do a little work in the configuration..." As services arise, problems will be better isolated, and administrators will know which team to call for assistance. Such deep service management also delivers benefits beyond root cause analysis, such as capacity management.

Randy makes the following recommendations for achieving deep service management:

"Formulate your SOA management strategies; how you’re going to do successful SOA management before you start thinking about products to do SOA management.... You have to deeply know the technologies, know how complex your implementations are. Will your SOA solutions will be able to help you manage your services across the technologies? Will your SOA management solution be able to tie together the complexity and correlate the complexity?

"...Build deep SOA monitoring and management into your whole overall SOA management. It has to do with the design of your architecture, and all the elements that are part of the implementation of your services, and everything that's behind your service interfaces. Build deep service monitoring criteria into your product selection criteria as you are selecting SOA management solutions. ...Think in terms of orchestration engines, integration products, application servers, SOA applications, repository, and SOA management. Think of them and SOA management as one cohesive SOA management platform.

"So you need to understand the relationships and connections. The bottom line is to think about deep service management as you’re pursing your solution."

_____________________________________________________________________

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

"The simultaneous growth of investment in BI and SOA technologies is no coincidence," says Gilman Tobin, senior director of BI product marketing for Oracle. Both are top strategic focus areas, and along with BPM, form the foundation for a new application platform comprised of the “B3” categories (BI, BPM, and business rules).

Tobin, in a piece just posted here at ebizQ, effectively connects the dots between business intelligence and SOA.

For example, he points out, "being able to analyze the performance impact of business processes executing in a business process platform is a key objective for organizations developing SOAs." Data is captured and aggregated in dashboards made available to decision makers, made possible by SOA.

As Tobin puts it:

"Orchestrating the delivery of a cell phone to a customer may generate data such as time spent provisioning the cell phone, updating the appropriate accounts and delivering the product to the customer. The BI tool can combine this data with data stored from other systems, such as usage data stored in another relational database by a billing system and business intelligence may be used to present an aggregate view. By combining call usage data with process cycle time data captured from business intelligence tools, organizations can gain insight into the impact of process delays, such as the amount of lost revenue that can be attributed to delays in the process."

The combination of SOA and BI provides greater insight and visibility across business processes. And visibility paves the way to new innovation.

______________________________________________________________________

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

Why should self-respecting business care about event-driven architecture (EDA) and complex event processing (CEP)?

Because almost every company has operational activities that run continuously and must respond to rapidly changing conditions. Roy Schulte, Gartner VP and one of the world's leading authorities on enterprise systems, says that businesses should get to know EDA and CEP very well, as they are the tickets to early problem detection and predicting future threats and opportunities before they materialize.

Schulte will be talking about EDA and CEP in some detail at ebizQ's upcoming Event Processing Virtual Conference, to be held May 7th. Along with Schulte's keynote, esteemed speakers such as Forrester's Charles Brett will provide a taxonomy for event processing. David Luckham (founder of Rational Software) and Dr. K. Mani Chandy (CalTech) will provide perspectives on the convergence between EDA and SOA.

Click here for more details on ebizQ's one-day Event Processing Virtual Conference.

_____________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA Events  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone talks about how SOA is reshaping the roles and priorities of developers, but how much change can they really be seeing? Maybe the real big changes are happening elsewhere up the food chain.

SearchSOA's Rich Seeley recently spoke with John Michelsen, chief scientist at iTKO, who pointed out that thanks to SOA, "no job is being more radically changed than that of business analyst."

Ironically, developers may see the least impact of anybody from SOA. As John puts it:

"I think it might be fair to say that the individual developer writing code is the least affected because he or she is taking requirements and building a component, testing components, and plugging it into a larger system. That in itself is not that different than it was five years ago. So, ironically, the developer may be the least impacted by SOA."

So what did the business analyst do, exactly, before the advent of SOA? Essentially, they created requirements documents for developers to follow. Usually, in John's words, it was a "Word document filled with 10 Commandments-style 'the-system-shall' statements and screenshots illustrating the functionality end users required."

Now, with SOA, business analysts need to learn to work with business process modeling tools instead of creating 300-page Word documents, John said.

But it's all good, he added.

New business process modeling tools on the market even enable business analysts "to describe processes in business language rather than in IT jargon." In the process, since business analysts now have to describe the overall business application that is being built from the services, this is forcing greater alignment between IT development and the business.

And, after all, isn't that the name of the game for SOA?

_____________________________________________________________________

Posted by joemckendrick in Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)