I'd like to call your attention to a new author being published on ebizQ today, who has written a fascinating piece on SOA Antipatterns.

Tarak Modi, an executive architect at Unisys, articulates elements of SOA that are unusable. He enumerates and introduces us to the concept of 'antipatterns.'

"Antipatterns, just as their name indicates, are the exact opposite of patterns (just like matter and antimatter for all you science buffs). While patterns are good and should be embraced as much as possible, antipatterns should be recognized as early as possible and be avoided at all costs. In short, antipatterns are those things that if not caught and fixed early on, pretty much guarantee doom and gloom for your project."

Do you recognize any of the following antipatterns in your own organization?

Antipattern #1: The "Same old, Same Old" Phenomenon
Antipattern #2: The "Big Bang" Approach
Antipattern #3: Service Fiefdoms
Antipattern #4: Technophilia
Antipattern #5: Bloated Services
Antipattern #6: Anorexic Services
Antipattern #7: Hyper Brokerage

Check it out and please let me know what you think of the article.

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"webMethods has long recognized the opportunity for enterprises to extend reuse to their entire portfolio of IT assets, including services, business rules and processes, data and infrastructure. This is in sharp contrast with our competition's more limited view of reuse," said David Mitchell, president and CEO, webMethods, Inc. "This acquisition advances our vision for reuse by enabling us to offer our customers the most advanced, standards-based technology for managing the underlying metadata that is essential to the reuse of all IT assets."

"Despite the image typically presented by most modeling tools, business processes are both dynamic and transitory. With each component of the process possessing its own rules, parameters, and interrelationships, which frequently change based on a variety of circumstances, more complex processes simply breakdown due to the incompatibility of many of these interrelationships," said Marc Breissinger, CTO, webMethods, Inc. "When used to enrich a specific process, semantic metadata helps overcome inconsistencies by providing a higher level of agreement to meaning and intent. This allows for the richer orchestration of the transactions and interactions that fundamentally define the process. The end result is that semantic metadata enables higher levels of automation, more assured decision-making and greater efficiency throughout the process."

Read the full release here.

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I spoke with Manoj Saxena about IBM's acquisition of his company, Webify, about IBM's new foray into SOA industry verticals, and about IBM's overall SOA plans. Listen in!

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Initial thoughts from ebizQ columnist and OnStrategies' President Tony Baer:

Extended Tony Baer commentary here.

IBM's acquisition of FileNet had an almost anticlimactic air about it. In retrospect, the more obvious question is what took IBM so long? Heck, it’s been almost three years since EMC bought Documentum.

IBM has recently been on a binge in acquiring some of its closest partners, witness last week’s MRO acquisition. FileNet is no different. While company officials couldn’t answer off the bat how many joint engagements they have, they are clearly no strangers to each other. And even where formal joint engagements leave off, clearly FileNet has enough IBM Global 2000 customers that there is large potential for the deepening its footprint.

Regarding the urgency, there's little secret that it’s all about compliance. Despite all the grumbling, SOX is not likely to go away anytime soon. And thanks to recent publicized security breaches from VA, AOL and elsewhere, neither are privacy protection laws. Companies under stronger mandates than ever to protect the veracity and confidentiality of their data, and they are going to require more robust management tools in place to track who retrieved what and when. For IBM and others, there's clearly lots of money to be made helping customers pick up the trail of breadcrumbs.

From a technology standpoint, the acquisition of FileNet is a logical follow-on to its two-year old Venetica buy, which literally put the pieces in place enabling IBM's Information Integration tools to access the trove of unstructured data sources, such as FileNet.

And with FileNet, IBM is acquiring a fairly healthy company with sufficient market presence and name recognition to retain its own brand name once inside IBM's Data Management business fold. And with IBM, FileNet gains a huge service channel to upgrade more of the installed base to the more dynamic, workflow-enabled P8 product architecture that gets beyond the domains of traditional image management. That's a work that's still in progress.

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IBM (NYSE: IBM) and FileNet Corporation (NASDAQ: FILE) today announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire FileNet, a publicly held company based in Costa Mesa, Calif., in an all-cash transaction at a price of approximately $1.6 billion, or $35 per share.

More here and as soon as I have it.

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Considering the enormous strides taking places these days in the integration security space, and the fact that we're hosting a great security blog, Andre Yee's Security Insider, ebizQ has lauches Integration Security as a hot topic, and we're welcoming feature article submissions, new security blog coordinates (so we can link to your blog entries from the section), as well as all your security news.

Check it out and get involved!

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According to David Linthicum's "other blog," IBM is gobbling up its second company in the same week.

From MRO Software:

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and MRO Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: MROI) today announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire MRO Software Inc., a publicly held company based in Bedford, Mass., in an all-cash transaction at a price of approximately $740 million, or $25.80 per share. The acquisition is subject to MRO Software shareholder and regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2006.

MRO is the leading provider of asset and service management software and consulting, used by many of the world's top companies to efficiently manage how they buy, maintain and retire assets - such as production equipment, facilities, transportation and information technology (IT) hardware and software - in a wide variety of industries including utilities, manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications. This acquisition builds upon IBM's strategy to leverage business consulting, IT services and software to develop repeatable tools that help clients optimize and transform their businesses.

As more types of corporate assets are touched by technology, companies are looking for ways to consolidate how they manage these assets - both operational and IT-related. IBM's acquisition of MRO addresses this need by providing customers with a consistent, comprehensive set of asset management solutions and services. MRO asset management technology and consulting services will be integrated into IBM Software and IBM Global Services offerings. As a result of the acquisition of MRO, IBM will be the only company to provide the solution to this convergence of IT and industrial assets.

Full release here.

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