When announcing the acquisition of Fuego, Alfred Chuang, Chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, Inc. claimed that now BEA is "the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments."

Sorry, but not by a long shot Alfred. This is still an early market, but there are a number of contenders from different camps. First, the integration vendors. We’re essentially down to Tibco and webMethods, along with some niche players. They do all of the above. Both are repositioning their offerings as SOA platforms, now that EAI is so passé.

Then there are the platform vendors – IBM, SUN, Oracle, along with BEA. They all have development and integration platforms. SOA requires both, although the integration. These vendors have some advantages including company size and installed base. And they are all taking SOA very seriously. In this case, I’m not seeing slow moving dinosaurs waiting for upstarts to come and eat their lunch. They’re all over SOA.

And then there are the upstarts – the pure plays. And there are many of them. What pure plays often do best is innovate in the market. Many of the pure plays focus on certain aspects of the platform, such as the registry and governance, or testing, or development. Also, you’re going to find here that some of these pure plays are now calling themselves composite application platforms. Some are calling themselves SOA platforms. Seems to be more terminology than technology that makes this so. In a recent webinar, Steve Craggs referred to the whole space as an SOA Ecosystem which I think is a very good description of how companies will actually move forward in creating their SOA in an incremental and evolutionary way.

Above All calls themselves a composite application platform, and focuses on how to create and manage composite applications. Above All can expose an application interface so it looks and acts like a web service, and can abstract underlying services into higher level services.

Recently I spoke with Creative Science Systems, which has a server that can handle both Java and .net without code changes, along with an ESB, orchestration, and an adapter generator. But no registry, governance or BAM.

The SOA Ecosystem requires other capabilities including security, testing, and all the other things required to bullet proof enterprise applications. These “holes” will continue to be an opportunity for the smaller players. At this point, this is still an emerging market, which means as long as SOA remains a hot topic everyone and anyone will use it to describe their product offerings. But the operative word in SOA is architecture. That means planning and designing first - then figuring out which products fit into the architecture. Despite the many marketing claims, do not expect to buy your SOA as a shrink wrapped solution or a single install.

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Continuing to explore the claims made by Alfred Chuang, Chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, Inc. in regard to the acquisition of Feugo, here we look at whether BEA now has a unified SOA-based platform.

What does unified mean in the age of SOA? Predictably, Annrai O'Toole, CEO of CapeClear, a competitor SOA platform, stated in his blog BEA's Strategery, that “the success of SOA is dependant on open standards” and the acquisition of proprietary software doesn’t contribute to a unified platform.

While I agree 100% that open standards have finally lowered the risk barriers of moving toward SOA, although it has been considered a best practice for software architecture for over 25 years, I’m also a pragmatist. Standards alone don’t solve all problems. In building the SOA, it’s important to decide what needs to be standard, and what can be proprietary.

Interfaces need to be standardized. This is what lowers risk to adoption. No more CORBA vs. COM/DCOM/.net decisions to make. Web services solved that dilemma and made SOA the “new” hot buzz word. But the value of SOA implemented on an integration infrastructure, is that it shouldn’t matter what is behind the interface. It can be a legacy system, an ERP, a home grown proprietary system. That enables an evolutionary approach to SOA. Not all the services are going to be Web services on day one. But there’s also a difference between standard and unified, right?

What does unified mean? For one thing, how many installs are required? How well are the components of the toolset integrated? How many development interfaces are you going to have to learn? In the case of a truly unified platform the ideal answer should be one. That is not yet the case with the BEA “unified” platform. So what is unified?

Fuego already runs on WebLogic, as well as the new BEA ESB. So there is runtime integration. Development integration is a whole other matter. Think it’s going to take some time before WebLogic programmers can seamlessly model the orchestration of a composite application from the development environment. Development integration impacts learning curves, ease of use, and development speed. Bottom line is that all the parts of the BEA platform will actually work together. But they are not yet truly unified. Sun is in the same position with its integration of SeeBeyond. I would call both these platforms more integrated than unified. IBM, on the other hand, has unified its platform. Modeler v.6 runs in Eclipse 3.01 and is fully available from the development platform.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. That’s part of the examination of Chung’s claim that BEA has the ONLY unified SOA platform. Stay tuned, because, as you’ve probably guessed, the competition is stacking up.

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In referring to its recent acquisition Alfred Chuang, Chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, Inc. stated, "The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments."

That statement bears delving into. First, what is an SOA-based platform? Second, how can buying proprietary software create a unified platform? Third, does this really put BEA far out in front of the competition? This blog will look at the first question, what is an SOA platform? I’ll deal with the other issues in the next few blogs.

So what is an SOA-based platform? SOA is a set of architecture principles that includes creating loosely coupled software components that can be put together to create a business solution, and reused in creating new business solutions. The benefits of loose coupling are enabled by event-driven design. Furthermore, if we learned anything at all from the past two decades of object oriented programming, reuse requires management and governance. So how does this all translate into an SOA-based platform? Actually, although hype and press usually win out in these situations, it would probably be more accurate to call it an application for building composite applications. IMHO, a composite application platform includes the following capabilities:

• Develop new services (typically based on Web services standards)
• Create service abstractions by combining several low-level services into a more useful, reusable high-level business service
• Design and model the behavior of the composite application, including how information and messages flow across services, and how services need to be orchestrated in support of a business process
• Discover services or browse from a registry of available services
• Manage policies and service level agreements to engender trust and enable the reuse of services
• Deploy the resulting solution into a managed run-time environment

That’s the software part. Please take note that none of these software capabilities will produce event-driven loosely coupled services. That’s the architecture part.

So, how did the acquisition of Fuego enhance BEA’s SOA-based platform? The press release seemed to equate BPM with SOA. OK, that’s because SOA is a hot buzz word. The ability to design and model the composite application requires orchestration. BPM provides this – and more. The important difference is the “M” in BPM, which stands for management. BPM goes far beyond monitoring processes in real time, optimizing processes through simulation, providing management dashboards. BPM delivers bottom line benefits. It’s a hot market all itself. Fuego is a very good BPM solution. BEA bought some good software. But we need to keep delving into the unified SOA-based platform claim. Stay tuned.

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I confess I was dragged kicking and screaming into this world of blogging. Frankly, I don’t think my style is well suited for it. I’ve had 2 books published, and another is almost complete. I prefer to consider and edit my words.

In fact, as I get older I find that I prefer to listen more and speak less, to reflect before I react, to weigh my opinions and be more careful with my words. I have no interest in letting you know what song is going through my head. For example, I haven't weighed in with a reaction to the BEA acquisition of Fuego, because first I wanted to schedule briefings with both BEA and Fuego. I plan to post something once I speak with them. and have some insight to share. Apparently my style is not well suited to blogging.

But it’s all about Web 2.0 now, and I need to change with the times. However, the real issues companies are now facing with SOA and integration implementations are complex and multi-dimensional. Beyond the hype is a lot of hard work. Business agility needs to be designed and planned - it doesn’t just happen by moving faster. It is my belief that companies need to know best practices and frameworks that provide success. They need insights. Am I incorrect in this assumption?

I’d like this blog to be a forum for sharing issues, problems and solutions with our ebizQ community – that’s you. So please send me your questions and comments. I really want to hear what you are most interested in. This is a way to communicate your interests, and that will influence my research and blog posts.

What are the critical issues you are now facing? What do you consider are the most formidable barriers to SOA and integration within your organization? Looking foward to hearing from you.

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