SOA appears to have become the holy grail of IT. While it has been a known best practice for over 25 years, only recently have the obstacles to SOA been removed through the universal acceptance of the Web services standards. Now that the risk of SOA adoption has been removed, it is a must have for organizations seeking to increase agility and competitiveness.

Achieving the benefits of SOA depends much more on how a company commits resources and organizes for success, than on a particular technology. The most important success factor for technology decisions is how they fit into the overall architecture. This requires an understanding of how to create an integrated infrastructure to support to development and rapid deployment of SOA-based solutions.

But the most difficult challenges in SOA have nothing to do with technology. These include organizational factors such as who designs and controls the architecture, is it centralized, decentralized or is there a hybrid approach. Who defines and manages cross organizational processes? Who controls access to data? How do you design web services to maximize reuse and business agility? How do you design and implement an event driven architecture?

The answers to these issues do not come in a shrink wrapped box. They cannot be purchased from a vendor, or outsourced overseas. To gain competitive advantage from SOA, organizations need to develop core competency in SOA architecture, design, development, deployment and management.

For this reason, I have decided to chair the new education committee within the Integration Consortium. The mission of this committee is to define the roles within an organization that need education and the set of skills, standards and tools each role requires. We plan to define certification requirements for a certified SOA and Integration Architect, and one or more types of SOA and Integration Specialists. These certification requirements can be used by organizations as guidelines for their training and hiring programs. The education committee with also take a leadership role in contributing to the Integration Body of Knowledge I-BOK that will contain content in support of the certification standards. This material will be available to members at no charge. Membership to the committee is open to all IC members.

Next Tuesday, April 21, 2006 at 12:00 ET we are presenting a live webinar entitled “The Road to SOA Enlightenment”. This webinar will feature interactive polling. Join in and let us know what you think are the most important factors to SOA success. To register click here: http:///www.ebizq.net/webinars/6857.html Hope to hear from you then on line, or please respond to this blog. What type of training or education do you think is needed to ensure SOA success?

Posted by bethgb in Industry Trends | Permalink | Comments (3)

Just before leaving for vacation I spoke with Jacada about the release of their new Jacada Fusion solutions. The solutions include Win Fuse, Web Fuse, and Host Fuse which provide non invasive integration to windows, Web and host applications. Jacada is focusing on solutions for contact centers.

Adding desktop and Web integration greatly expands the Jacada story, which was formerly more about Web services on the mainframe. Focusing on a specific market to sell solutions instead of technology is also a good strategy for Jacada. But what is also interesting is that Jacada is embracing Web 2.0 and providing an open platform that enables SOA. Web 2.0 is more about services than about packages, and here lies the lesson for buyers of solutions. While industry solutions can provide a quick fix, the ultimate return on investment depends on the agility of the solution to accommodate change. That is what SOA is all about.

And there is much in the new Jacada solutions to make SOA architects happy. While the current development environment is based on extensions to BEA’s WebLogic, Jacada plans to move to Eclipse, then JBoss and Websphere. They also plan to provide the ability for non-programmers to create scripts for call center agents. Agents will be able to design their own layouts by moving portlets around.

The Web 2.0 features include support for AJAX for rich client functionality, RSS feeds for syndicating content, and mash-up capability to combine content from multiple sources into an integrated experience.

What this amounts to is a number of features to enable adaptable solutions that provide core call center functionality and can be easily customized. The last point is what I think is the key feature companies should for in buying solutions. They should be easily customizable because you will always need to build or customize to provide competitive advantage.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)