On this crisp Fall day, I'm blogging in Manhattan at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. Right now, BEA's chief architect Paul Patrick is speaking on how to create a sustaintable SOA infrastructure that will enable simplified, efficient and sustainable innovation. He is working to bring the concepts of "social computing," i.e., Web 2.0, to Web services optimization. He said this is already going on very broadly in a number of industries.
Paul's perspective is that one must build the foundation for continuous change, "...so when, not if, change happens, you're ready for it," he said.
"The reality is we all have a based set of assumptions," Paul said. If we have created a powerful service, and start rolling it out, say in the banking industry, your service is going to get pummeled and your assumptions are shattered, Paul said.
Paul reported that companies have moved beyond the concept adoption phase and are now rolling out SOA in the enterprise. He warns that people are still best suited by evolving their SOA from project to project.
Comcast is one of BEA's customers, and they identified what projects to start building with and went forward with those. Paul said the project-by-project approach involves an "enterprise chassis," which has the SOA initially constructed around the first major project set to deploy.
Paul continued on with some explanations of how process fits into all this. "You can express IT capabilities as business services tied to business processes for flexibility."
He also explained a bit further about how social computing is incorporated into all this. He is saying people are using this "as a way to get closer to their customer. SOA is forming the base foundation for doing this. The SOA remains in charge of the data."
It's a more organic-like thinking, Paul said. "Expand your SOA with a new kind of innovation. Ask yourself, how can I take this social computing which is organically-based and marry it with the standards-based, shared services ecosystems?"
The future, Paul said, indicates that truly global dynamic enterprises are enabled by the fabric that underlies it. "We are already seeing businesses taking advantage of sharing services, like embedding internet services like eBay, so if a company want to sell something but doesn't want to build the underlying infrastructure. This enables for real drag-and-drop enterprise application composition," he said.
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