SOA in Action

There's been a lot of rancor across the industry and blogosphere about the viability of SOA from the top down -- instigated as part of a huge business change -- versus bottom-up, in which individual SOA efforts pop up across business units, with the possibility of federating these efforts down the road.

But, sometimes, it's just so much easier when the CEO is laying down the law. That was the experience with Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a provider of financial services for Canadian agricultural businesses. FCC's approach was very much driven from the top down, instigated by the CEO, who brought in a new CIO specifically to move to SOA. As a result, the establishment of SOA principles for developing and managing applications was in place within 90 days.

FCC employed SOA methodologies to restructure itself from a silo organization, with each silo supporting applications for a particular business function, to a “service-centered” model, where applications are constructed according to service oriented architecture (SOA) principles.

As described in a new report in MIS Quarterly Executive, the transformation of FCC to a process-centric organization is scheduled for completion by the end of 2011. FCC moved to SOA with a six-step process:

1) CEO driven: "The CEO initiated a culture change initiative that underpinned his vision of creating a customer-centric organization."

2) Process revolution: "The organization focused on what needed to be done to integrate the corporation’s processes and systems to enable it to provide a great customer experience."

3) IT itself was transformed. "The CIO assessed the current state of the IT organization, and all current IT projects were halted while this was done." Siloed approaches were abandoned in favor of an architecture-centric approach supported by SOA principles.

4) A proof of concept was undertaken "by implementing a carefully chosen business process with SOA."

5) Governance: "The organization undertook a detailed redesign of other processes, and working through the governance issues of managing a process-driven IT organization."

6) The benefits to date of transforming the IT function and its technology were articulated. The CIO identified a range of benefits, from improved communication between the business and IT, to the development of reusable IT assets.

Complete PDF available here. (Free registration required.)

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

As I just reported over at my ZDNet blogsite: I received word that Progress Software -- in the news this week for its acquisition of integration tools vendor IONA -- has also acquired Mindreef, a provider of SOA service validation and testing environments.

MIndreef's value proposition is interesting: it provides a common platform and interface into the entire service lifecycle for any and all professionals involved in developing or using that service. Enterprise architects, integration specialists, developers, and managers alike to collaborate on service design and implementation.

No further details are available other than an FAQ on the Mindreef Website, so this seems to have been a quiet acquisition. (It's unclear even when the acquisition actually happened.) Mindreef says it and Progress will be hosting a Webcast in mid-July to discuss the acquisition, and direction of Mindreef's products, which include the SOAPscope quality and testing line.

Mindreef founder and CTO Frank Grossman is a technology visionary, so Progress is definitely adding a good team to its growing organization.

Thanks to MomentumSI's Jeff Schneider for alerting us to the news.

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

Progress Software announced that it is acquiring IONA Technologies in a deal worth about $162 million.

Progress said the IONA acquisition helps round out its product line to provide a "complete SOA backbone" for customers. The company said the deal is expected to close in September, pending regulatory approval in the U.S., IONA shareholder approval, and issuance of an order by the Irish High Court.

IONA's Artix product line offers Web standards based integration technologies for exposing legacy applications to SOA implementations, as well as open source SOA integration components through its FUSE product line. IONA also has endpoint integration with Microsoft's .NET Windows Communications Framework and the open source Spring Java application framework. Progress said these offerings are "fully compatible with the Progress Sonic ESB."

Progress Software has assembled quite a collection of SOA and enterprise computing technologies in recent years, which includes ESB provider Sonic, SOA management/governance vendor Actional, mainframe data integration specialist DataDirect, and mainframe-to-Web vendor NEON Systems (now part of the DataDirect Shadow line).

Some analysts/observers were unmoved by the announcement, however. Dennis Byron, ebizQ's pen source guru, observed: "Effectively this means little to the independent middleware market which had already collapsed in upon itself when BEA was folded into Oracle." He added that "IONA had ceased to be a major factor in the market early this decade, struggling to turn it around from a plateau one-third the size of its 2001 peak of $180 million in revenue." Dennis notes that IONA adds some plum telecommunication and financial services firms to Progress' customer roster, however.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, chairman and CEO of WSO2, also felt that the acquisition was no big deal, as reflected in a blog post entitled: "Yawn. Um. Oh yeah .. Progress bought IONA." Sanjiva called the purchase of IONA, which made about $78 million in 2007, as a "fire sale."

Jason Bloomberg, quoted in PC World, agreed, also adding that IONA likely offers better technology while Progress offers better marketing to the deal. "IONA gets to be part of an organization that has strong sales and marketing, as well as a deep customer base, and Progress gets some of the better technology on the market at what is arguably a fire-sale price."

Some observers fretted that the IONA acquisition would result in competing ESB products. However, the "inestimable and seemingly inexhaustible" Tony Baer (Peter Schoof's apt description) said in a new post that Progress was probably more interested in IONA's Big Iron legacy customer base than its ESB offerings. "This is another step in the winnowing of the ESB market, if there still is such a creature," Tony says. "Last year, which was a good one for the software industry, saw IONA’s revenues go flat and margins sink into the red." Tony feels that the prime attraction for Progress "is the legacy base of Orbix customers whose transaction-heavy loads provide a good complement for its DataDirect business."

The direction of IONA's open source initiatives remains an open question, however. Dennis put it this way: "If IONA was last man standing in the independent middleware market, Progress can be thought of as last man standing in the closed-source culture. One way IONA was trying to get things going again as an independent was through its embrace of the open source culture, development model and terms and conditions."

But it appears, at least from the press release, that IONA will be retaining a degree of independence, so it may have few constraints pursuing its open source strategy. Progress has typically maintained the independent branding of its acquired companies.

Sanjiva says not to worry, Apache will do fine, with or without fully engaged Progress/IONA support. "What will this do the open source projects that Iona used to contribute heavily to in Apache (Apache CXF, Apache ServiceMix, Apache ActiveMQ etc.)? Well, even if Progress decides to defy progress and not go open source (which is my expectation), that's where the beauty of Apache comes in. The maniacal focus on community diversity will mean that even if Progress decides to cut of their own participation in these projects, the projects will live on."

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

Over the years, many companies have turned to app servers -- both Java Enterprise Edition and Microsoft .NET framework -- to handle, under the covers, the "plumbing" of messaging, standards, and protocols. App servers were seen as the easiest on-ramp to SOA.

However, how much of a role will app servers play in the SOAs to come? Do companies even need app servers?

ebizQ is conducting a survey on application server usage, and the impact of SOA on app servers. This survey explores how enterprises plan to implement new types of applications such as SOA, Web 2.0, mashups, open source, etc. Will you continue to use application servers? Take our survey and you'll be entered to win $100!

Click here to access the survey.

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Open source platforms offer a compelling value proposition for SOA deployments, and two case studies presented at the recent Red Hat summit demonstrate how this value can be realized.

Writing in CIO, CIO's Esther Schindler provides accounts from SJ, the Swedish railroad, and North State Communications.

SJ integrated its ticket sales with online auctions, to move seats not sold 48 hours before departure would be auctioned online. The railroad turned to SOA to make this capability possible within its enterprise framework.

North State Communications turned to SOA to facilitate a billing system transformation. The company employed ESBs and JBoss to automate the way it makes services available to customers.

Pierre Fricke, director of SOA product line management for JBoss, said companies are only just starting to consider open source platforms for SOA. He expects the trend to accelerate by 2010. (Thanks to Matt Assay for the pointer.)

Open source is bringing SOA capabilities to what have been unserved or underserved markets -- such as small to medium businesses. Since the inception of SOA in its current form about five years ago, large commercial vendors have concentrated on the high-margin, deep-pocketed companies. Open source commoditizes SOA offerings, making it more affordable to more companies.

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In a new Q&A published at SearchSOA, Dana Gardner surfaces a part of IT always pushed to the background in every sweeping paradigm change. Yet, no paradigm change could happen without it.

We're talking about storage, that is. The question is: Doesn't SOA ramp up demand for persistent storage? Actually, Dana pointed out, a well-implemented SOA increases efficiencies and improves the way the moving parts of the enterprise interact with each other. Dana makes the point that storage itself has been "service enabled" long before people thought of service enabling apps.

Indeed, the notion of storage area networks (SANs), in which storage devices are pooled and seen as one single storage device across all parts of the enterprise definitely seems to be a precursor to SOA. This may have been the first cross-enterprise technology-sharing venture, and perhaps there's a few things we can learn from the experience. For example, how does a business unit that has invested heavily in massive storage arrays share these devices with other users? Are there any chargebacks in place? How are storage budgets distributed across users?

Ultimately, the storage behind SOA will benefit from greater efficiencies, made possible by extending the service-oriented mentality to both applications and data. As Dana put it: "The biggest payback over time will be the effective use that SOAs make of these newly modernized data services. In effect, SOA makes all the major parts of IT infrastructure and assets work better together, and so the investments in storage efficiency and data rationalization and transformation may be the best examples of how the reduced IT TCO whole is greater than the savings already gleaned from the storage parts."

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Forrester analyst Randy Heffner, who has made frequent appearances here for ebizQ events, has just released a report that describes the best way to "build a SOA." (Full report available here at ebizQ.)

Or actually, as Heffner points out, the multiple ways to build a SOA. "There is no one best sequence for building an SOA platform," he writes. "Even though most SOA platforms start with messaging technologies such as HTTP, SOAP, REST, and message queuing, there is no one dominant way or sequence in which to build an SOA platform. The wide diversity among various organizations’ existing software infrastructures, combined with each firm’s different priorities and drivers for SOA, lead to a wide diversity of investment streams for building SOA platforms."

Plus, Heffner adds, incrementally is the best way to go. Businesses keep changing, as do SOA products, so "the majority of firms evolve toward their SOA platform."

According to Heffner, Forrester recommends the following five steps for building an SOA platform:

1) Identify existing infrastructure’s SOA capabilities. In other words, know what you already have, Heffner says. This helps avoid duplication, especially when it comes to spending money on new products. "Identify which functions your existing products provide fully or partially."

2) Identify priorities for new SOA capabilities. Pull out or develop application roadmaps and estimate how SOA-based services will map against these plans, Heffner says. "identify the major types of service implementation styles that will be required for the high-priority services you must build over the near term. For example, service orchestration or legacy integration might be a high priority for your SOA platform, in which case, the first step is determining whether your existing infrastructure can fulfill these requirements. If there are gaps, you can then investigate SOA specialty product categories, such as ESBs or integration-centric business process management suites, to learn how they might close the gaps."

3) Identify your long-term needs for SOA capabilities. This determines what kinds of products a company buys down the road, Heffner says. "Identify your high-level long-term needs for your SOA platform. For example, you may be able to get by for now with lightweight SOA management capabilities (e.g., simple monitoring of service implementations) based on your existing IT management tools, but you will likely see a future need for the stronger SOA features and functions that an SOA management solution provides (e.g., managing service contracts for SOA-based services)."

4) Match your platform plans to your organization’s investment strategy. "Most organizations buy products in connection with specific projects," says Heffner. "However, we see an increasing number of firms that intentionally position such purchases as merely the first stage of a growing investment in the selected products, with each subsequent solution project expanding the investment to meet its needs."

5. Evolve your SOA platform in line with the business value of solution delivery projects. "Find the investment that, within the current project’s bounds of affordability, meets near-term SOA requirements fully," Heffner advised. This is "the approach that best keeps an SOA evolution on track and that has the most palatable investment model."

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

In today's news, ebizQ reports on a new bulletin issued by Butler Group which made the case that any and all SOA depends on governance. However, as Butler Group states, governance is more than putting a bunch of technologies in place, be they registries or repositories. The real issue is on an organizational level -- often, services are put into production long before governance comes along, and then everything has to be retrofitted.

As we have found in surveys conducted here at ebizQ, most early SOA efforts do not have governance of any kind in place -- typically, organizations hold off until they have some type of critical mass of services before they consider it worth investing in governance. As Butler's Rob Hailstone put it: "Most organizations deploying SOA leave it too late to implement effective governance. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it becomes to 'retrofit' governance to an operational SOA environment. However, the effort must be made if the SOA initiative is not to descend into chaos."

The recent ebizQ survey, conducted in partnership with SAP, finds that even companies with the most advanced SOA deployments – in terms of enterprise reach and number of reusable services – have yet to formulate governance strategies or methods to measure the value of their SOA to the business. The survey finds that only one out of seven companies currently have active governance efforts underway.

The low level of governance is perhaps not that surprising, since many organizations are just starting their SOA implementations. What was eye-opening about the survey, however, was that even among the most advanced sites surveyed, two out of three companies do not yet have comprehensive governance programs in place. In addition, many respondents see their current or planned governance programs as being ineffective, the survey finds. Even among the most advanced SOA efforts, governance is not delivering its full value.

I recently joined SAP's Christian Hastedt Marckwardt in a Webcast discussing the survey results, and the evolving role of SOA governance. (Click here to access the full Webcast.)

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

What are people working on these days, SOA-wise? That's the question put forth by SOA entrepreneur extraordinaire Dave Linthicum, who reports that the pace of SOA is slow, but steady.

Companies are not jumping head-first into new approaches and technologies, but are carefully planning and considering where they are going. Every SOA is coalescing into a different and unique combination of patterns (like snowflakes, DNA, and landfills). And while that doesn't mean a rush to embrace SOA, that's a very good thing.

Dave says he's seeing five essential activities underway at many locations:

Modeling and implementation: "Holistic modeling of the SOA and all of its working parts."

Security design and implementation: "Figuring out how you're going to secure and govern your SOA."

Semantic understanding and metadata modeling: "Identifying all application semantics and defining the common metadata model."

Service design and implementation: "Designing services properly, implementing them, and tracking them."

Orchestration and process modeling: "Modeling processes, and implementing them directly from the model."

Note the strong emphasis on modeling. This is important in making the architecture clear and tangible to the business users. Dave adds that SOA practitioners "are not yet looking for 'key enabling SOA technology,' at least not yet." As shown by the above five areas of concentration, the focus is on setting up methodologies, defining deliverables, determining how all of these artifacts are related, and education.

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

We all know what we need to know about SOA, and learn more every day (especially if you visit the ebizQ site on a daily basis, right?).

But how much do you know about some of the inner workings of SOA? Or the history of some of the standards and practices?

ebizQ has created a challenging quiz to test your SOA acumen. In 10 tough multiple choice questions, you will find out where you fall on the SOA IQ continuum. For example, how acquainted are you with the origins of SOAP and XML, or the essential commands of REST?

Score an 8 out of 10 or above, and you'll rate a place in the "SOA Boardroom"!

Take the quiz here.

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In many posts on this blogsite and across the ebizQ universe, we talk about how bad duplication of systems, services, data, and staff time can be. Bad, bad, bad -- down with duplication.

However, some duplication of systems and efforts may be okay for some businesses. What's important is that the business itself decided that the duplication is okay and fits a business purpose, and the decision wasn't solely left to IT.

I just published a piece in the June issue of Insurance Networking News on IT governance, a concern that is shaping the way IT interacts with the business, and visa-versa.

Jeff Goldberg, analyst with Celent, said governance is essential because "no longer can IT make decisions inside of a black box... In many cases, IT has unilaterally made major systems decisions without thinking about the business implications, such as the purchase of a content management system. As a result of lack of governance, "multiple IT projects end up competing with each other for scarce IT resources."

I also had the opportunity to speak with Brian Abeyta, VP of the IT project management office at AFLAC -- you know, the insurance company with the goose. He described how IT governance has been baked into the company's culture -- from the president on down to line managers. AFLAC's IT governance is led by a high-level steering committee chaired by the US president. At the next level is a "C-level" review board, then, for smaller projects, boards run by line-of-business VPs. Until this board structure was put in place two years ago, Abeyta said, IT staff resources were often consumed with projects that extended beyond their useful life.

Since this article was in Insurance Networking News, it discussed the requirements for organizations with multiple, diverse lines of business, which is the trademark of this industry. The result is separate systems in a lot of different silos, run by managers who don't regularly interact with each other. So that means plenty of duplication. For example, you may find two separately maintained $10-million policy administration systems within the same unit of the same insurance carrier.

Sounds wasteful, and hopefully doesn't drive up rates. But then again, there may be a business reason for keeping this duplication. Many companies may want to keep this duplication because certain aspects of each system provide competitive advantage, or leverage with a vendor that supplies other requirements. What governance enables managers to do is to speak up about these decisions, Goldberg pointed out. "While the business may ultimately decide it is in its best interest to maintain duplicate systems, the important thing is that the business -- and not just IT -- made the final decision."

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Fellow ebizQ community activist Brenda Michelson provides a glimpse of panels the SOA Consortium will be hosting at the impending Gartner AADI and EA (Application Architecture, Development, and Integration and Enterprise Architecture) Summits, to be held in O-Town, FLA.

Todd Biske will be involved with both panels, so you know it will be good -- extremely reasoned and informative.

On Wednesday, June 11 at AADI, Todd, along with Melvin Greer and Mike Tavis, will be talking about measuring the value of SOA. The panel, to be moderated by Gartner's Daniel Sholler and SOA Consortium's Richard Soley, will explore companies' experiences in justifying and measuring the value of their SOA activities, including developing initial business cases and continuously demonstrating the benefits.

On Friday, 13 June at EA, John Williams, Maja Tibbling and Marty Colburn will join Todd to discuss SOA & EA lessons learned from the trenches. This panel will be moderated by Gartner's Bruce Robertson and Richard Soley. Panelists will look at the links, synergies and dependencies between SOA and EA. They will address the big question of the moment: How does SOA fit into the EA picture?

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

The foundation of any SOA effort is the connectivity underneath that brings together all the IT resources needed to bear. On June 4, ebizQ will presenting the next in its series of virtual conferences, "Connectivity in Action."

Enterprise connectivity is almost synonymous with MQ, the backbone from IBM that almost single-handedly created this market. In fact, the occasion for this conference is the 15th birthday of MQ.

As IT veterans may recall, the early 1990s were heady days when systems designers just started out figuring ways to integrate the proliferations of different vendors' platforms that were proliferating. In those days, I was director of an international management association, and we ran our operations off two systems -- and IBM S/36 midrange for membership and product sales files and reports, and a Novell-based PC network for special projects and conference management. Our managers had two screens and keyboards for two separate systems at their desks. The world has come a long way since then, of course. If I still ran the association today, it would be extremely virtual.

Of course, my challenge was relatively tame compared to many large organizations that have multiple back-end systems and hundreds, if not thousands of applications scattered across their enterprises. For these companies, MQ provided a way to weave this fabric together. That's why it's only appropriate that we hear from IBM's MQ gurus to start the day. In a panel discussion, IBM's Dermot Flaherty, Ben Mann, Andrew Bainbridge, and Morag Hughson will discuss the technical issues around enterprise messaging.

The panel discussion will be followed by Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester, who will examine the steps required to build a modern SOA infrastructure and will discuss how to integrate assets with the right Quality of Service to match business needs while addressing scalability, transactional integrity, low latency, Web 2.0 technology, and much more.

Ben Mann, Worldwide WebSphere MQ Product Manager, will discuss the future of WebSphere MQ, as well as issues when connecting wide-ranging assets, such as qualities of service, heterogeneous platforms, and application support.

Marc-Thomas Schmidt, distinguished engineer with IBM, will talk about the MQ-ESB connection, and will describe the demands for a federated model and how governance, security, and management will be required to build a successful federated model.

The conference will wrap up with a customer panel discussion, featuring the senior technical managers of Nationwide Insurance, Department of Massachusetts, and the New York Power Authority. Panelists will describe the types of connectivity solutions these organizations have deployed, what they learned along the way, what obstacles they encountered and how they overcame them, and what they consider the most critical success factors were.

Be sure to check in on June 4 for ebizQ's Connectivity in Action virtual conference.

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Southwest Florida is a booming region (real estate bust or not), but there are limits on growth -- particularly as it relates to the availability of water. That's why any and all new projects need to be cleared through the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Think of it as a governance board for water management.

The District originally managed data and transactions on a mainframe system, but in planning for is Water Management Information System (WMIS) -- designed to automate and streamline the paper- and time-intensive well-construction permitting process -- it was decided to move off the mainframe and onto a distributed system developed to support SOA approaches. For the few thousand transactions the system would be processing each day, the mainframe would be overkill, said a District IT manager.

Jeffrey Schwartz, writing in Redmond Developer News, describes how the District set out building its SOA-based system, designed to replace the mainframe system by 2010. The new system will better automate the permit application and approval process, while providing Web access and supporting geospatial data. The agency used Microsoft .NET to create a SOA to integrate Unix, Linux and host-based systems. New applications would be written in C#. The solution also ties together disparate Cobol applications, Oracle databases, an enterprise content-management repository and a geographic information system.

Challenges stemmed from the move from green-screens (the mainframe's 3270 terminal environment) to GUI-based environments. As Schwartz noted, the District's IT team had its work cut out for it in terms of nintegration of disparate systems, finding and retaining developers skilled in .NET and Visual Studio, and the cultural change that was brought about in the move from green screens. "Getting different groups to agree on business rules was an additional challenge," the article observed.

The District reports that since implementing phase one, well-construction permitting (WCP), the District has had 86 percent of its nearly 17,000 permits processed electronically. "We can get a better picture of what's getting permitted; that's something we could never do before," said one District executive. "We have to handle a lot less permits in-house and we can now do some risk management in permitting." The District also says the WCP phase has saved the equivalent of one staff person's time over a year.

Reuse is another benefit that is emerging from the project. It is estimated that 35 percent of the Web services developed for the initial permitting app are reusable. Many of the geospatial data types likewise can be shared, along with database structures such as contractor data.

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