Elizabeth Kratz's Business Agility Watch
ebizQ editor-in-chief Elizabeth Kratz gives a daily dose of Web happenings for the business technology industry; the industry that builds, powers and ensures business success.
April 10, 2008
Is SOA Boring? Tony Baer's Report from IBM IMPACT
Fantastic piece out today from the incomparable Tony Baer, in which he responds to Steve Mills' comment that SOA is just about blocking and tackling the intricacies of ESB and all, by asking him in an interview if SOA is getting rather boring! Tony is just so un-hype-able that he is an absolutely treasure. Enjoy his most fabulous commentary, here. If Tony didn't already exist, he would have to be invented.
IBM's Mary Hall gives a rousing roundup of IBM's IMPACT User Conference opening session, which kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas.
The first news item of particular note is the social network being developed by IBM on the topic of SOA.
According to Mary:
"Sandy Carter, IBM's VP of Marketing and Channels described the network as a concept to " brings together a like-minded, global community of thought leaders, information technology (IT) and business professionals, university professors and students, and other interested parties through both online and in-person forums designed to help members build skills and share best practices."
The IBM SOA social network is open to any customers, partners, academics and interested parties aiming to advance and share SOA knowledge and best practices. Membership is free and not restricted to the IBM community.
Mary noted several more interesting items that we will continue to learn about today, including new ventures in industry platforms for innovation (if this interests you, sign up for our panel on SOA in Financial Services, here), and a reloaded BPM Suite with Business Events included. Mary also mentioned the SOA healthchecks that can help your SOA get operationally fit.
I'll check back in later in the day and see what else IBM is up to! And if SOA in industry verticals is of interest to you, sign up immediately for our April 16th panel discussion on SOA in Financial Markets.
March 25, 2008
Enterprise Architecture for Financial Institutions
You wouldn't be the first person to say that it's about time ebizQ starting delving more into specific architecture solutions for industry verticals like banking and insurance. So that's why we're doing it, most notably through a roundtable scheduled for April 16th on financial services.
The live panel discussion, titled, "Visibility, Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today's Financial Services Industry Challenges," is being moderated by Ronan Bradley, ebizQ's SOA Roads blogger, who, as former CEO of ESB startup Polarlake and now principal of Lustratus Research, has reached industry luminary status especially in the field of SOA for banking and financial insitutions.
Joining Ronan on the panel is Ron Ambuter, CTO of the BPM Workstream Group at JPMorgan Chase. Ron has over twenty years experience in application development management, analysis, design and delivery, workflow, imaging and Business Process Management (BPM).
Also on the panel are Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Progress Software, and Keith Swenson, Chief Architect, Fujitsu. I have a sneak peak podcast with Keith coming out next week, where he will detail a case or two that he will mention in more detail during the panel. Shortly following that will be another sneak peak podcast with Hub Vandervoort, of Progress.
So don't miss what is certainly going to be a great event. If you're in financial services, or if you're designing SOA or BPM services for banks or other financial institutions, this is a discussion that will definitely be of interest. Sign up now by clicking here!
March 11, 2008
Do You Work in the Insurance Industry?
Here at ebizQ, we're getting a lot of interest in specific SOA-type solutions for industry 4verticals. I am interested in hearing from people who work in industry verticals, like insurance, to find out if the solutions you are using are geared toward your industry, or if you are patching your legacy infrastructures together with packaged applications already on the market. Please comment, or email me at editor (at) ebizQ dot net.
According to IBM, insurers today face a difficult struggle to streamline their business processes and keep costs down — all while differentiating their products, keeping their customers happy and maintaining independent agent loyalty in a fiercely competitive market.
Consumers are demanding high service levels 24x7, across all communication channels. Business leaders have reported that their success depends on how innovative they can be in their response to market demands. Their ability to adapt and change can make or break their ability to drive this type of innovation. They need a vision for where their IT strategy needs to head and drive it there.
An upcoming ebizQ event (sign up here!) will discuss the level of innovation that dynamic business applications can drive to accelerate process flexibility. The roundtable will examine what it takes to stay competitive — and to stay in business — and discuss specifically what solutions insurance companies need to consider. In addition, we'll share one very specific solution designed to help you create a level of responsiveness you didn't think possible with your existing property and casualty processes that are often hard to implement, support and maintain.
Sign up here. The live event is March 25th at noon.
February 27, 2008
AMR Research: SOA Spending is Way Up
AMR just released the results of a survey they did about SOA spending. This is going to be an interesting compliment to ebizQ's survey, "SOA Market Pulse," which is coming out in a couple of weeks.
Companies adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) spent $1.4 million on software and services in 2007, according to a report released today by AMR Research.
"The SOA Spending Report 2007-2008," which surveyed IT executives from the United States, Germany, and China, found that the primary drivers for SOA investment were to meet the need to change investments faster, cheaper, and with less risk (22%), to meet requirements of individual projects (18%), and to reduce IT costs through reuse (17%).
Survey respondents represented a cross-section of companies with 500- 10,000+ employees in the process and discrete manufacturing, retail, wholesale/distribution, telecom, and financial services industries. According to the survey, SOA adoption and spending largely varied across vertical industry, location, and size of company.
"SOA adoption and interest varied by industry in some surprising ways," said Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research. "Financial services, the top revenue vertical reported in vendor interviews, came in at the bottom in our SOA adoption tally. Upon further analysis, we discovered that while a smaller percentage of financial services companies have adopted SOA, those adopters are spending a great deal more on SOA than their peers in other industries. In other sectors, more of the industry has adopted SOA, but the average company spends a more modest amount."
Additional highlights of this report include:
SOA adoption is broad based and growing rapidly -- China, Germany, and the United States all showed adoption growth rates of over 100%.
SOA spending is significant -- 45% of SOA adopters reported spending over $500K on SOA software and services in 2007.
In a really interesting blog entry, Jim Sinur (formerly of Gartner, and now with Global 360), said that while BPM can survive well managing human-only activities without SOA, SOA really cannot exist without BPM. "As more rules and processes are leveraged as reusable components, they take on a SOA flavor," he said.
According to Jim:
BPM enhances the very essence of Service, but services can also be processes. It is a strange relationship and certainly a codependent one, indeed. This is why there is BPM in my SOA, and SOA in my BPM.
January 09, 2008
Asian SOA Market Quietly Explodes
Reading this article by Simon Burns from vnunet, I was astonished by how Asia's service oriented architecture (SOA) market could more than double to $2.2bn by 2010.
"Awareness [of SOA] has increased substantially in the past year, and we are now seeing this translate into healthier adoption levels across Asia," said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, a senior analyst at Springboard Research.
"SOA continues to gain traction in the market as more companies are implementing SOA or planning to do so."
The article also indicates that almost half of companies involved in mergers and acquisitions deploy SOA.
December 12, 2007
Dave Linthicum Interviews SOA Visionaries
David Linthicum just interviewed his second SOA Visionary, Frank Grossman, founder and CTO of Mindreef. It's a really great podcast about functional quality testing for Service-Oriented Architectures.
October 30, 2007
Panel on SOA and Web 2.0: Joe McKendrick, Dana Gardner, Phil Wainewright
The trade press and analyst community have been abuzz with excitement over the potential of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 -- broadly defined as applications or capabilities delivered over the network, such as Software as a Service and mashups, as well as collaborative tools such as blogs and wikis.
SOA and Web 2.0 share common goals, and there is enormous potential for Web 2.0 to accelerate SOA efforts. But how do we connect the dots between Web 2.0 and SOA? SOA and SaaS, for example, share common frameworks. Then there's the enhanced collaboration SOA developers and architects can achieve as a result of Web 2.0 tools. Then there's the mashup scenario, in which end-users can build their own applications -- the ultimate vision of SOA. Finallly, front-end environments such a Ajax and other rich client interfaces may help extend the "last mile" of SOA to the desktop.
Learn Everything There is to Know About Open Source SOA
Click here to join Dennis Byron for an overview of ebizQ research into the various ways that open source software (OSS) enables SOA. The research looked at the different styles of SOA, and provides OSS options by services type (applications and infrastructure). A top-down view of emerging defacto and dejure standard OSS SOA stacks is included along with descriptions of OSS software that can be mixed and matched meet transaction processing, collaboration, business intelligence, content management, and other business solution needs.
Tune into this session to learn actionable information to help you take advantage of the OSS culture and business model as you SOA-enable your enterprise
Today's SOA practitioners find their greatest architecture challenges addressing reliability and scalability for composite applications and processing large payloads. This session presents a breakthrough design for SOAs that deliver continuous availability and linear scalability for services and applications. With new approaches that include middle-tier data caching, load balancing and HA through service-level grid enablement, you can make your SOA bullet-proof.
Inquiring minds simply must know. ebizQ's ever creative Gian Trotta boldly asked the question that has simmered at the back of our minds for years.
"WHICH IS IT!?!"
That's right: Is SOA pronounced "ES-OH-AY," or "SOH-UH?"
We've asked the public for their response, and they're really rolling in. Take the quick poll here (and maybe win something cool!) and we'll let you know in a few days what the deal is!
Also, if you care about stuff like this, you probably also care that SOA in Action, the virtual conference, is coming up at the end of the month. Joe McKendrick, Roy Schulte, Randy Heffner, you name it! We've got a great lineup so sign up here!
September 07, 2007
Dave Linthicum Interviews SOA Visionaries
I'm happy to tell you about the first ever SOA Visionaries Podcast. This is an exciting new ebizQ podcast series, featuring a veritable "who's who" in the world of SOA and Web services management. We're talking to people who are making an impact, not only with their products and technology but also with their unique vision into the market. This series seeks to help people grow and add insight to their Web services infrastructure and SOA.
In this installment, the incomparable Dave Linthicum speaks to Juliana Camorano of Progess Actional.
September 04, 2007
MuleSource ESB 'Forges' New Open Source Environment
Today, Mulesource launched an open source hosting service for MuleSource users, called Muleforge. Pretty cool because they're offering a shared community environment, with a fully managed hosting site for Mule extensions and applications for the Mule ESB. It's been very exciting to see this company grow and try new things. They reached their 500,000th download only last January.
ebizQ's Open Source guru, Dennis Byron, also publishes today his interview with Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource's CEO. Get that here.
All this MuleSouce excitement also brings me back to a great interview I did with Dave Rosenberg almost a year back. Interesting how the concepts all stand the test of time. Enjoy this blast to the past here.
August 02, 2007
Beth Gold-Bernstein's Review of SOA for Dummies
ebizQ's venerable VP, Beth Gold-Bernstein, recently reviewed John Wiley and Sons' SOA for Dummies book, part of the 'Dummies' book series.
While Beth made sure to note that she thought the book had many attributes, the primary one being its readability, she said the book has some inaccuracies in it that she'd like to see corrected in the next edition.
For example, in the SOA architecture diagram they have a service broker connecting to an enterprise service bus. This confused me, because what is an ESB if not a broker? It routes messages to services based on content, polices, and rules. It is functionally equivalent to a message broker, and some vendors renamed their message broker an ESB. In fact, some vendors claim the ESB is a pattern, not a technology, and claim a number offerings that are functionally equivalent. But the essential function an ESB provides is brokering requests and responses between services.
The Wiley folks agreed to take a look at Beth's suggestions for the next edition, so if you have any comments about other inaccuracies to correct, write a comment on Beth's blog.
July 09, 2007
Open Source: The Wild West of Software Development
One of the hottest topics in the enterprise technology space right now is open source. Open source is kind of the Wild West of software and, increasingly, application development. There is just so much going on, what with the Free Software Foundation people screaming at each other, with general public licensing debates, with Linux development, JBoss, Red Hat, Google, Salesforce.com, even the government is getting in on it... and it's hard to keep it all straight.
For an open source neophyte like me, this story about the FCC fighting open source just brings more questions than answers. And we have IONA and Mulesource, both companies we've been following for some time, developing their open source ESBs faster than we can even think of uses for optimized service-oriented messaging.
That's why here at ebizQ, we've brought on a top industry analyst to talk about these issues, with our audience's input, every day. ebizQ's new senior open source software analyst, Dennis Byron, has spent the last 30 years analyzing middleware and other emerging technologies for various firms, and we're really happy he's here with us now, to "agnostically" help us navigate the exciting new world of open source.
About Dennis Byron:
Dennis Byron, ebizQ's Senior Open Source Software analyst, is also a Senior Analyst for Research 2.0, which is aimed at institutional and individual investors in information technology (IT), or just anyone who likes to peer under the covers of "the financials" where both large companies and emerging IPOs like to bury their most interesting facts. Byron has more than 30 years experience researching and analyzing all areas of information technology and information-systems use. He was the ERP and Middleware Analyst with the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill and at IDC FROM 1991 TO 2006. He has conducted over 500 specific information-systems case studies, and has contributed to Application Development Trends magazine and other publications.
June 18, 2007
Things You Might Not Know About SOA Software
At the Gartner Summit last week, I had the special pleasure of meeting Roberto Medrano, EVP of SOA Software. While he did mention that the company had received a $24.9 Million infusion of capital recently resulting from selling their services business to Zensar in India, what was even more interesting to me was the story of Roberto's life, and how he got to be drinking coffee with me at the Gartner "biosphere" in Nashville.
Long before his rise to prominence in the SOA and Web Services space at SOA Software (which owns the SOA.com domain), Roberto arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico with a pair of jeans, two t-shirts, and his guitar. He worked full time tirelessly to earn enough to go to community college. Then he finished up (with a flourish) and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering at USC. But that's not all. Packing his guitar, he went to MIT to get a Master's in electrical engineering, and then double-backed to L.A. to receive an MBA from UCLA.
He is now a recognized executive in the field of Internet security, as he helped to create the firewall, content security and security policy segments of the security market. Medrano has been an active member on President Bush’s National Security Advisory Committee, National Cyber Security Summit, and the White House National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. He also participated in President Clinton’s White House Security Summit. Medrano has extensive experience with both start-ups and large companies, having been involved at the beginning of four IT industries: EDA, Open Systems, Computer Security and now SOA.
Roberto reports that he doesn't have the jeans and t-shirts anymore, but he did keep the guitar. Read more about Robert Medrano's meteoric rise on SOA Software's bio page here.
Truly, this guy is cool. One of the ones that makes the whole Gartner biosphere worth the trip.
June 12, 2007
At Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit
I've been a bit silent this week, but that's because I'm at Gartner's big yearly SOA pow-wow, the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit. I've been crazy busy with meetings, but I'll blog soon about all the breaking news. I've got some good stuff for you!
So I hereby present you my five ways to ruin your service-oriented architecture before it's even built, and some explicit instructions that will ensure that your organization is service-averse:
1. Don't ask the people who work at your company what applications they like and what they need and expect from their technology.
2. Don't commit enough resources to fully assess what legacy applications you have, and what works and doesn't work.
3. Add a new tool every time you need to generate a new kind of data.
4. Don't consider the open source community's excellent agility tools that are now finding their way into the enterprise.
5. Don't do SOA next week and not the week after. To quote Burton Group's Anne Thomas Manes, who did this great podcast with me and Joe McKendrick last week: "If you are unprepared to make the big changes that will need to be made in your organization, then you have to scale back your investment."
SAA here in 2007 is Service-Averse Architecture, a term I coined on Tuesday with the help of a friend (who remains anonymous for his own protection), who was really frustrated with his organization's IT system.
It turns out SAA is the kind of IT architectures that prevail in countless hospitals, financial institutions, governments, and retail companies. The kind of architecture that holds you back, that you simply can't depend on. It's the kind of technology that makes you hate your job, or makes you resist the urge to throw your computer out the window. It makes your job harder, not easier, and it isn't getting better. SAA causes data breeches and slows down commerce. In hospitals, bad information, or no information, can even kill.
But identifying any problem is the first step in its solution.
Today, I offer you a podcast featuring Anne Thomas Manes, esteemed VP and Research Director of Burton Group, speaking with myself and ebizQ contributing editor and SOA evangelist Joe McKendrick.
Listen to or download the entire 15:21 podcast below:
May 16, 2007
Anne Thomas Manes' Keynote: 'The Great Potential of SOA Comes With Great Risk'
Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Research Director at Burton Group, in her InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum keynote, said widespread adoption of SOA presents great advantages.
"But with great potential, comes great risk," she said.
"If you are unprepared to make the big changes that will need to be made in your organization, then you have to scale back your investment. You can't do SOA next week and not do it the week after. You have to commit, for life.
"Like physical fitness, SOA is a lifestyle. This is not a short term investment, it is a long term commitment. You will start to realize good value quickly, but you will not realize the full flexibility until much later."
Many SOA adoptions are going to fail, Anne said, due to insufficient enterprise-level planning.
"IT is not healthy. 70 percent of total capital spending by the company is on IT budgets, and projects fail regularly. They are late, they're overbudget, and they don't deliver on the service they're expected to provide.
"This is the problem," Anne said. "More than 80 percent of the budget is spent on maintenence and operations and new projects account for only 20 percent.
"How many of you have over 1,000 applications in your organization? Most of the organizations I work with have well over 500 appllications, and they are essentially accomplishing about 35 different things, but less than 20 core capabilities," she said.
"How many of you have more than 500 databases? There are way too many databases that contain virtually the same information, which are incompatible.
"You are spending too much money on boat achors. These (legacy) systems are weighing you down, and you have very little money left for innovation," Anne said.
The SOA fitness program requires a new and different perspective:
1. Be aware of your bad habits. Don't build a new application if you need one new capability.
2. Look at your existing applications. Identify redundancy.
3. Retool your application into a service.
4. SOA is about refactoring duplicate capability into a service. Applications then turn that capability into a service.
SOA is not integration, Anne said:
1. SOA is about design, not technology. "Technology provides the tools. It's up to you to use them effectively."
2. SOA is about reducing redundancy, or dismantling application silos.
3. Integration increases redundancy, and reinforces application silos.
4. Designing Shared services is hard, and requires a very different mindset.
5. It takes time to build services that are actually usable.
Without considering the processes that are in place and the services you want to provide "All you have is a bunch of services you're trying to do a technology justification for," said Marvin Richardson, cofounder of Trexin Group, LLC.
"The services can do certain activities and in some cases you can automate it." If you start automating activities with services, you can bring more efficiency to the business, said Derek Sampson, Senior Director for Back Office Architecture at Comcast.
"We need to move to our own application-centric perspective of the enterprise, to a more process-centric approach. That's where SOA comes in. You can leverage and reuse architecture for repeatable processes," said Sumitro Sarkar, VP of Technology Strategy for Thomson Financial.
Service-Averse Architecture: The 'Big Kahuna of IT Problems'
Earlier today, I went to the SOA Exec Forum speakers' suite to say hi to David Linthicum. There also Eric Knorr, Executive Editor of InfoWorld, sitting with Anne Thomas Manes, Research Director of Burton Group, all got to talking with us about the current state of SOA adoption. They agreed with me that the current application frameworks of most companies is not Service-Oriented Architecture, but rather Service-Averse Architecture (SAA), a term I started throwing around yesterday on this blog.
It's so simple that even someone who doesn't know anything about IT can immediately grasp what we mean.
Thomas Manes, who is delivering the anxiously awaited 4pm InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum closing keynote, responded: "We have to ask people, what are the business processes in your organization that don't work very well? Where do people encounter problems in getting their work done? Once you know that, you can get an idea of what you should be working on," she said.
The root cause of most IT problems is redundancies, poor portfolio management and different formats of data, said Thomas Manes, "So you have to go back, look at your portfolio of applications, and then look at the cultural and organizational aspects of the business."
"This is the fundamental flaw in the way people build application systems. If you're not ready to address the organizational and cultural issues, don't pretend that you're doing SOA," said Thomas Manes.
"That really is the big kahuna of all IT problems," said Knorr.
Joe McKendrick, SOA in Action blogger and an ebizQ contributing editor (and noted SOA rock star who regularly trashes rooms at the Roosevelt Hotel, I hear), then joined us in the speakers' suite and I brought him in on the action. He has agreed to join Anne Thomas Manes and myself on a podcast tomorrow to better define Service-Averse Architecture, which, when identified, could possibly provides us with some "anti-patterns," on the recommendation of Brenda Michelson, to avoid while building SOA.
I look forward to delivering that podcast to you on Friday.
SOA Exec Forum: Hammer Time, or "Nailing SOA Security"
At a technology track panel on SOA security at InfoWorld's fantastic yearly SOA C-level extravaganza, otherwise known as the SOA Executive Forum, they're talking about what needs to happen to secure service oriented architectures.
On the panel is Mark O'Neill, CTO of Vordel, the author of the book Web Services Security and a contributing author to Hardening Network Security, both published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill. He talked about the benefits of web single sign-on, digital asset management, and recommenda that people access their web services along with other identity management tools, such as PKI digital asset management solutions.
Mark warned that with Web 2.0, services can be built from the bottom-up, using mashups, and that carries a significant risk, he said. "When we've looked at what other organizations are doing, a lot of times, if you have a particular widget in mashups that is going to be running with other untrusted widgets, there can be issues... It really is the Wild West from the security point of view. It's easy to write a widget that could spy, etc.. There is a lot of risk from a security point of view, and rather than people tying together their own mashups, they should look to vendors who have worked on this [in the sandbox, on 'sandbox issues'] already."
Jim Culbert is CTO at Weather Services International, a provider of meteorological data, services and systems. Jim oversees the company's technology, integration and service delivery strategies. Mr. Culbert spent the early part of his career in distributed systems sponsored research and development at MIT where he continues to lecture on system development topics. Jim has been a regular speaker on SOA and Web Services over the past seven years and has authored and contributed to numerous articles on these topics.
Jim explained that his company's recent SOA security challenge involved trying to tie in many small customers together, with secure certificates (identity management certificates) to plug into an organization SOA. With a lot of different mom-and-pop shops logging in to utilize the SOA, it was hard on one end to assist the individual customer to feel comfortable with the mechanism, and also difficult to tie everything back into sales and distribution. Challenges included tracking creditials and developing centralized (or decentralized) provisioning systems to tie the customers back in.
Breaking SOA bottlenecks, one company at a time. Slow, laborious process, it seems.
For those of you whose hair turned white long ago -- if you have any of it left -- you'll recall SAA as standing for "Systems Application Architecture," IBM's ill-fated plan to standardize the way you wrote software for its countless mainframe, mini, and microcomputing platforms of the 1980s.
Why the history lesson?
Both SAAs are/were destined to fail. Both were developed on the principle of emphasizing expedience over architecture. If you have incompatible platforms, it's easy to specify software APIs, but it's more of a stretch to believe that a standard would ensure that an app written using the same standards for user access, programming interface, and communications support could paper over the architectural differences separating batch from interactive computing.
Similarly, skipping the user consultations or the up front architectural planning dooms a development team to repeating past mistakes... over and over again.
Of course, services are not the universal solvent -- not all apps or use cases lend themselves to the loose coupling that's intrinsic to SOA. But the implication of this modern reincarnation of SAA is that you actually want to expose applications as services, but aren't willing to do the homework.
Which reminds me of a friend of mine's senior year inscription in his high school yearbook: "For every question, there is an answer that is simple, direct, forthright, and wrong."
In a world where absolutely everyone is trying to develop a service-oriented architecture, a methodology that bases the development of IT architecture on the actual business problem you're trying to solve (or, the service you are trying to provide), it appears that current architectures that exist in some places are somewhat averse to this.
That's right. You heard it here first, gentlemen. Service-Averse Architecture®.*
A service-averse architecture is:
An architecture that is built without having first consulted the people who will use it.
An architecture that is unreliable or does not deliver on its promise.
An architecture that is so secure and complex that it discourages people from using it comfortably.
An architecture that is so insecure that its data is compromised, corrupted, lost or stolen.
An architecture that, in short, is averse to the services it is expected to provide.
I bet Tony Baer will have a field day with this. How about a feature on this, Tony?
February 13, 2007
Blogging Live@Tomorrow's Web Services on Wall Street Conference
I'll be blogging live tomorrow, once again at the fantastic Web Services on Wall Street conference in the Big Apple. I'll be meeting with old friends and new, so if you want me to blog about your product or company, come find me! I'm going to try to break my record of five (sensical) blog entries in one day.
Send me an email if you want to set up something, at elizabeth _@_ ebizq.net
Fantastic interview that Rich Seely (http://www.searchwebservices.com) did with James Bryce Clark, director of standards development for OASIS. He said he believes the next frontier for SOA standards will be e-commerce and dynamic content.
"In the second part of this Q&A interview with James Bryce Clark, director of standards development for OASIS, he talks about the future of semantic standards to make more intelligent use of the information organizations rely on for their business applications.
From Mr. Clark: "...At OASIS, you see OpenDocument, which is about content organization. The Universal Business Language (UBL) is coming out in a stable 2.0 version. There are also elaborations of it to cover various business cases. We just spent time with the Danish government, which is fulfilling its regulatory requirement for procurement and taxation, to make all invoices of a certain class use UBL. The business cases are there. Also banks involved in money transfers are using the data harmonization model to convert large amounts of electronic transaction traffic into forms that can be read by anybody. There's a tremendous move now to harmonize this information, and more importantly to give it some knowledge representation.
James McGovern -- what can we say about this smart guy?
James is employed as an Enterprise Architect for a major Fortune 100 enterprise. His focus is on the human aspects of technology around open source, enterprise architecture, agile software development, product line practices and outsourcing. James is a popular speaker at elite technology conferences around the globe. He is a member of the Java Community Process and the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects.
The best kind of advice is from someone who's already been through it, right?
Log on here for the next event in the SOA in Action conference, which features an SOA Customer Case Study. It's starting right now, at 1:00 PM ET. And if you're logging on later, this link should send you to the archive to replay.
November 14, 2006
SOA in Action Virtual Conference is Tomorrow!
I'm really excited about tomorrow's virtual SOA in Action conference, bringing together the industry's most visionary analysts, technologists and bloggers.
Setting aside the fact that the 'almost inexplicably' cool Joe McKendrick is moderating several panels, did you know that Dave Chappell, Chief Technology Evangelist for Progress Software, is headlining a panel discussion about understanding ESBs? You may remember Dave as the firecracker who ignited the blogosphere this past summer about the possibilities and perils of SOA reuse. He's a huge star and he literally wrote the book on ESBs. This panel is tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2:00 PM Eastern.
November 13, 2006
Plan It, Build It, Manage It AGENDA
Click this link for the finalized agenda for Wednesday and Thursday's SOA in Action Conference. Learn from industry experts and in-the-field SOA practitioners about how to help you on your SOA journey, whether you're in the planning, building, or managing stage.
You love his blog... now log on to hear him podcasting!
Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action/Rock Star blogger, has recorded some excellent podcasts as part of our partnership with InfoWorld and their SOA Executive Forum.
New today is a Webinar preview about how the company Enporion, Inc. eliminated its IT backlog with SOA. This live webinar will happen on November 15th at 1:00pm Eastern. Sign up now!
If you're a regular reader of my blog, you're probably a regular ebizQ reader, so you'll hopefully have heard about our exciting virtual conference, SOA in Action, taking place this coming Wednesday and Thursday! If you haven't had a chance yet, sign up now for the great keynotes from Gartner's Roy Schulte and Forrester's Ken Vollmer, as well as seven other Webinars on topics to help you plan, build and manage your SOA investment.
Register now and don't miss the live conference and all the cool interactive features that come with it.
October 12, 2006
Sandy Kemsley: BPM Enterprise Software Lagging Behind Web 2.0
Our own fantastic Column 2 blogger Sandy Kemsley says the once the MySpace Generation starts entering the workforce, enterprise architects will have their work cut out for them in catching up their tools with the kind of on-demand computing models that these young 'uns have become used to. It's high time we started introducing social networking concepts to our BPM tools, Sandy says.
October 03, 2006
Mulesource Rolls Out Open Source ESB
In the next day or two, I'll have a podcast for you of an interview I just did with Dave Rosenberg, one of InfoWorld's Open Source bloggers, who also happens to be CEO and founder of Mulesource, an open source ESB company. The version being released today is available at http://www.mulesource.com/.
Joining the competitive landscape and comparing itself on some levels with IBM Websphere, Sonic and Cape Clear (except free and open source), and working interactively with projects such as Spring and Tomcat, Mulesource is certain to shake up the ESB space a bit.
September 14, 2006
SOA Becomes Academic Discipline
Today, IBM and Georgetown University made a move to start development of courseware at the college and post-college level in service-oriented architectures. The project, helmed by professors already working in the field from the College of Charleston and George Mason University, seeks to address the growing demand for information technology (IT) skills that can empower an organization to more rapidly respond to changing marketplace conditions.
"Both of the new programs – one for IT professionals and one for undergraduates and graduates – are designed to teach all students about service oriented architectures," a release said.
This week, ebizQ has launched the SOA in Action Resource Center, one place where you can find articles, podcasts, research, white papers, Webinars and more, on planning, building and managing SOA solutions.
On November 14th and 15th, ebizQ will also host a two-day virtual conference on SOA in Action, which will feature case studies and panel discussions from those who have successfully implemented SOA solutions.
>Click here for more information, and to hear my podcast on SOA in Action, with ebizQ Training Center Director, Beth Gold-Bernstein!
August 31, 2006
Enter the World of SOA Antipatterns
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.
July 11, 2006
Forrester ESB Report Company Positioning
This graphic, published with permission of Forrester Research, shows the latest positions of the ESB vendors in the latest Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Bus Q2 2006 Report.
Forrester evaluated leading enterprise service bus (ESB) vendors across more than 100 criteria and found that Cape Clear Software and BEA Systems were the top two performers overall. Other vendors in the leader category (from the highest score down) are Software AG, Progress (Sonic), IBM, and IONA Technologies. These vendors all scored well in the connection, mediation, and control and change categories. Close behind are two strong performers, Fiorano and PolarLake. The two first-time entrants in this evaluation (Software AG and IBM) both scored exceptionally well and highlight the ability of larger organizations to quickly ramp up new product functionality.
**The above graphic is from “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2006,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 30, 2006. The Forrester Wave is a graphical representation of Forrester's call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the above graphic. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information or to purchase this report please visit,
>http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,38696,00.html.
July 06, 2006
Annrai O'Toole's State of the ESB Union
Cape Clear's Annrai O'Toole has a "worth a read," blog post up today, about what's going on in the wonderful world of the Enterprise Service Bus.
He references two recent reports from Gartner and Forrester, which both make attempts to assess the competitive nature of the ESB marketplace. Both reports, Annrai indicates, point to the overall health of the market and its enormous growth potential.
June 21, 2006
News out of Gartner: Cordys Reports Results of Three-Year SOA ROI Study
At the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit 2006 in San Diego today, Cordys, a provider of integrated SOA-based software that seeks to enable organizations to simplify business, today shared the results of a comprehensive independent study into the ROI and benefits of its SOA technology at a leading Chinese hydro electric power producer.
ebizQ received the following details:
The study takes a three year view of the implementation of C
Elizabeth Kratz's Business Agility Watch