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December 13, 2005SOA -- Main Theme at Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit
The Gartner integration conference is one of the most well attended integration conferences. There were over 1000 people in Orlando last week. Not surprisingly, it’s an occasion for many vendors to make news announcements. This December, most of the announcements were around SOA.
TIBCO announced a service offering for implementing an SOA called the TIBCO Accelerated Value Framework (AVF) version 6.0. Developed by its Professional Services Group six years ago (thus the v.6 designation), AVF offers a methodology, best practices, packaged services, and workshops for developing SOA solutions. While TIBCO claims its customers have been using TIBCO technology to develop SOA solutions, TIBCO has not previously been beating the SOA drum loudly. With this announcement that is changing; TIBCO plans to emphasize SOA more in its messaging.
This past year, SAP previewed 500 enterprise services, repositioning SAP as a set of enterprise services. In Q2 2006, SAP will deliver production-ready services. By the end of 2006, its XI integration broker will repositioned as an ESB as part of their SOA story. SAP plans to have all its applications service ready by the end of 2007. Companies will not necessarily be able to buy pieces of functionality as services, but at least SAP application functionality will be exposed as services. This is key as few companies have SAP alone.
Cordys, a Netherlands-based company trying to break into the US market, was previously positioned in Gartner’s application platform suite quadrant and is repositioning itself as a RAD tool for SOA. The Cordys Composite Application Framework includes an ESB, Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Master Data Management. Cordys is currently developing a set of reference accounts.
GT Software’s Ivory mainframe integration product is being positioned as an SOA tool that enables the mainframe to become an active participant in an SOA. It allows mainframe developers to easily wrap mainframe functionality as Web services without the need for consulting services. Ivory provides BPEL for the mainframe for visual assembly and runtime orchestration of mainframe services. It supports multi-step services, such as a CICS transaction, running through a number of green screens, then doing performing some functions, such as aggregating results – all without coding.
Farabi Technology Corp. announced the release of HostFront Enterprise Server (HFES) version 4.0. Running on a Microsoft platform, HostFront provides host access and integration with built-in clustering, session load balancing and failover. It can sustain 10,000 concurrent sessions with one host. HostFront natively integrates with MS Visual Studio, providing MS developers drag and drop capability for generating WSDL interfaces to mainframe systems. Farabi claimes this reduces programmer time by 80 percent. HostFront can generate code for TCP/IP or HTTP and supports both persistent and non-persistent connections.
iWay indicated that in January 2006 they plan to announce a new suite of SOA based tools.
One of the few companies NOT jumping on the SOA bandwagon is Microsoft. In their view, these “buzz words” are generally a four-year hype cycle and since we’re two years into the SOA hype cycle so they see no reason to jump onto this particular bandwagon. This seems to be a unique positioning in the market. To my knowledge, SOA has been considered a best practice for over two decades. SOA has much more relevance to creating agile IT infrastructures that can respond more quickly to business change. In my view, we are at the very beginning of the SOA journey. It will require discipline, process, methodology, governance, and best practices to succeed. It is hard work with large payoffs. While it may be a hot topic, SOA is not empty hype. What do you think? Can any company afford to sit the SOA wave out?
Posted by bethgb at 12:17 PM in
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SOA is a technology concept that is well positioned to provide value to the business elements within an organisation. It enables companies to become more responsive to their environments by enabling change to happen faster. SOA also enables Process Driven Integration and this is at the heart of most organisations. Successful process innovation is what will define the companies of the future.
To say SOA has hype may be true if a vendor cannot focus their offering to provide business value and improvements.
Companies that do embrace SOA need to be prepared to engage with the business and to ensure their solutions provide measurable business benefit. This is done using technology, proven methodologies for attaining rapid business value and a constant drive to ensure that these implementations are at the fore of industry best practises.
Posted by: Emma Murray at December 14, 2005 04:19 AM
SOA as a buzz word might go away, but application integration through a service interface is here to stay. Internet and the Web are still here aren't they?
Al
Posted by: Al Aghili at December 14, 2005 09:24 AM
Regarding SOA Hype and Value.
First, concerning the hype. I would distinguish three stages in technology hype:
Enthusiasm: The level of hype is higher than the level of technological maturity. It helps in an early adoption of the T. but leads partially to immature implementations. Some of them fail, which leads to a second stage;
Disbelief: The T. is mature enough but the hype is still kept high and it bites back. While there is still no widely accepted standard among T. providers, many T. consumers already have a negative reaction to the word itself. The only positive way out is reaching both the high standardization point and critical mass of successful implementations. If it happens, the next stage is
Acceptance – The level of hype is low, the maturity of the T. is high. The T. is a de-facto industry standard.
SOA is now in the second phase. While there are many successful projects, the rate of success is not high enough. There is no widely accepted standard or even definition of SOA. The artificial hype supported by vendors, each of which offers its own definition of SOA, works rather against its adoption.
However, SOA is absolutely not an empty promise. There are two main challenges the modern IT meets:
· High cost
· Low business agility.
SOA offers the right answer to the first challenge by allowing full decoupling of service consumers and producers. For the first time those consumers and producers do not have to register with each other. Instead, they register at run time with an external agent – Enterprise Service Bus. It makes them reusable by definition and easily replacable. This allows enterprises to untie their ‘spaghetti-like’ application integration architectures.
We say ‘ the right answer’ because there is also a wrong one. It is witless off-shoring of the ‘usual’ solutions allowing for the cheap creation of new layers of ‘spaghetti’ in company architecture. One day this approach is going to bring its followers to the edge of business catastrophe.
The answer to the second challenge is Business Process Management, which allows for the extraction of business logic from enclosed application silos and to expose it to the real owners – Process Analysts. This way the logic could be changed much more efficient making enterprise much more agile.
Posted by: Wolf Rivkin at January 11, 2006 05:31 PM
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