Editor's Note: Anyone interested in where SOA is at today and where it's going in the future must attend ebizQ's upcoming SOA in Action Virtual Conference coming this November 19th. Sign up right here.
Listen to my podcast with David Bressler, who provides Progress Software's customers and field teams with the expertise and experience to deliver Service Oriented Architecture. Bressler gives an excellent introduction to ebizQ's upcoming SOA in Action Virtual Conference that's coming this November 19, where Bressler will be a featured speaker.
Listen to or download the 5:15 podcast below:
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Now, first of all, what are some of the main reasons companies can become disillusioned with SOA?
I think people who find that they go out and buy a piece of technology and then all of a sudden they're going to have SOA and they're going to see all of these benefits without doing some of the hard things that go along with it.
The thing that popped into my head now its like trying to lose weight but only having a diet coke, not actually going through the hard process of exercising and discipline and really changing your eating habits. It's the same thing. You buy technology but unless you change the internal discipline, you're not going to really see those benefits and you'll get disillusioned.
Can you explain the trend toward full life cycle ownership of services?
Yeah, it's interesting because it's almost like companies need to take a more product-like approach to how they deliver services. I think often people or rather companies will create teams, they'll deliver a project, they'll disband those teams and they'll disband the development hardware, and then put it elsewhere onto the next project.
When you look at things from a service perspective, that service is now going to have a life cycle of its own and somebody needs to be responsible for that so that as changes to the services are required, or as new users want to use the service and they need to be onboarded and make sure that there's some regression testing without affecting other users and things that, this takes on more of a long-term ownership approach very much like a product company like Progress does for our products. But many companies whether financial or telcos don't necessarily approach their own internal integration projects the same way.
What is the challenge of doing real-time discovery and mapping of message flow?
I hate to sound like a product billboard sometimes but I am and so I just feel like when I have to I give a warning that, hey, remember I actually work for a vendor who sells software. But the challenge is that most technology presumes that you know what's going on ahead of time, you program it into the management system and then it tells you how it's doing.
In Actional's case, we actually have is really unique technology but because we're a relatively small player in the global world of IT, but we're just one voice, and people aren't thinking that they could actually do it differently than that some people think in order to manage I put it in a registry or I put it in a database somewhere or whatever.
But the real important thing is as you disaggregate consumers and producers, and you have these services all over the place, you want something that's going to automatically find where those services are, who's using them without making any changes to the services or without any à priori knowledge about what those services are and that becomes the really interesting thing about real-time discovery instead of what most people do in their minds is equate discovery with search. I know something's there and I can search for it instead of actually I don't know something's there and I can actually discovery it.
Very interesting. Now, in general, how can companies use SOA to manage change much more effectively?
Well, I think this is one of the biggest challenges and, I joke, people asked me what I do and I tend to just tell them well, I work for a software company instead of explaining what I do. But then if they push me I'll tell them well if everything if everything stayed the same, I'll probably wouldn't have a job because you build software and then it just does what you told it to.
The challenge becomes is that actually either somebody told you wrong, or their requirements changed, or its actually pretty difficult to do what you did so you interpreted them and did something slightly different and it wasn't right. And so over time, you need to change and that's where it becomes difficult.
Now, by having the right infrastructure in place, an again, in part leveraging that discovery but in part understanding how the services are owned instead of overtime instead of just having somebody look at them from a project perspective, you can now manage that change with a long-term perspective and hopefully make it easier to adopt change over time.
Excellent. And I want to make sure that anyone listening to this and if you have a question made sure you sign up for ebizQ's SOA in Action Virtual Conference so you can ask that question during the conference. Now, thank you very much for joining today David.
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