If you've somehow missed the news, ebizQ is holding it's second SOA in Action virtual conference. Last count we have over 2000 people registered for this event. Here at ebizQ we're all very excited about the program we've put together. In addition to the all stars including Roy Schulte, Dave Linthicum, Randy Heffner, David Chappel, Dennis Byron, Derick Meyers, and Joe McKendrick, we have a few other treats in store for you.

The virtual trade show includes virtual booths. You can visit the booths to download information, view videos, and even chat with reps. The booths are looking great. You should check them out for no other reason than they're cool. But to give you another incentive, we're doing a drawing for an iPhone for visiting all the booths. There's also a resource center with all kinds of helpful links to get you up to speed on your SOA research.

Joe McKendrick has provided you with a great overview of the sessions in the show. Check out the agenda and see for yourself. I've been working with all the speakers over the past few weeks and I'm personally very excited to be able to bring you such a high quality program. Do not miss either of the keynotes. Roy Schulte is always informative and insightful. I think you'll appreciate this keynote. We have over 1200 people registered for it!

Randy Heffner does a great job making sense out of building a SOA platform. This is one you may want to pass along to your colleagues. Don't worry, all the sessions will be available for replay. However, if you attend the live sessions you get the opportunity to ask questions.

SOA Alchemy will be of interest to you if you've got a mainframe still hanging around. And don't miss Dave
Chappel's talk on the Next Generation Grid Enabled SOA: Not Your MOM's Bus. This was a late entry to the show so a bunch of folks may have missed this one, but Dave Chappel wrote the book on ESBs, and this one is a must see.

Of course the session I'm most excited about is the one I'm doing with Brenda Michelson on Business Driven Service Design. Over the past year Brenda and I have been quietly working on a method for designing services that is repeatable, traceable, and most importantly, business driven. We're very excited about the work we've been doing. We're going to attempt to cram 2 days worth of material into 40 minutes. It's really just to introduce the ideas we've been working on, and we're looking forward to your feedback. So please, if you can't make the live session, listen to the archive and email your questions and comments.

Joe McKendrick and I are both doing live panel sessions. The panel sessions are usually very lively and very popular. And we have extra treats for you for attending these. At each session we will be giving away 4 different books: SOA for Dummies, , SOA for the Business DeveloperSOA Principles of Service Design, and Integration and SOA: Concepts, Technologies and Best Practices. The last book is still available free on our site as an ebook, but we'll be sending you real printed books. So good luck.

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While in Las Vegas I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Bill Brown , SOA Executive Architect and one of the authors of IBM’s SOA Governance and Management Method (SGMM). The method presents an iterative and repeatable way to develop a SOA governance model, implement it and manage it over the life cycle of a service. The method includes processes, models, best practices, templates, a starter set of policies and baseline metrics for 17 industries.

In his talk that afternoon Bill described a Governance hierarchy starting with business governance that includes establishing chains of responsibility, authority and communication to empower people to make decisions, and establishing measurement, policy and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their roles and responsibilities. IT Governance is a subset of corporate governance and includes all of the above relevant to the IT organization. SOA Governance is a subset of IT Governance focused on the lifecycle of services to ensure the business value of SOA.

In this hierarchy, IT Governance methodologies including ITIL and COBIT are very relevant.

Currently the method is available as a services engagement. IBM is also making it available as a free plug-in to the Rational Method Composer. However, that is a reduced set of content. It contains the phases, activities, and tasks, but no the templates, examples and metrics. IBM is also considering licensing the method itself.

Listen to or download the podcast below:

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This week I was in Las Vegas at IBM’s Information on Demand (IOD) conference, along with 6500 IBM customers, partners, and Gold Consultants. The IBM Gold Consultants meeting occurs once a year, and is a time for IBM to bring together consultants with executives and IBM Distinguished Engineers to share what IBM has done over the past year, what they are planning to do in the next few quarters, as well as some interesting work being done by the research labs. The IOD conference started off with a big splash. The keynote started off Monday morning in a big event arena with Cirque de Soleil acrobats, a rock band, and Dana Carvey. We were well entertained.

One thing puzzled me however. Steve Mills used SOA and BPM interchangeably – as if they were the same thing and meant the same thing. The authors of SOA for Dummies. recently expressed a similar viewpoint. They told me I was totally mistaken if I thought SOA did not require BPM. In fact, they stated "Nowadays though you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the two are separate." I know the authors spent quite a lot of time with the folks at IBM, so now I understand better where the misconception may have come from. Frankly, it really bugs me when vendors, authors, analysts or anyone else make erroneous statements to supposedly simplify the message that in fact only serve to further confuse an already confused public. Both Steve Mills, and the authors of SOA for Dummies are categorically incorrect when they state SOA and BPM are one and the same. BPM adds value to SOA. SOA can hasten the implementation of a BPM solution and make it easier to change. But they are two different things and you can absolutely do one without the other. The operative word here is CAN . Best practice for enabling business agility would of course be to combine them, along with EDA and BI. For a healthy and factually correct discussion on the intersection between SOA, BPM, EDA and SI tune into the SOA in Action panel discussion Oct. 31st at 2:00 ET.

I asked Vinodh Arjun, Program Director of BPM, whether it was IBM policy to talk about SOA and BPM as being the same thing. Vinodh is responsible for BPM strategy across the product lines. He assured me it was not IBM policy to use the terms BPM and SOA synonymously. He agreed that BPM was a separate practice, but there are synergies when you implement BPM on top of SOA. In fact, BPM can deliver the business value of SOA.

A little later in the day I spoke with Andy Warzecha, Sr., VP Information Management Strategy and Information Management Software. He caught us up on the major announcements IBM made this week.

Listen to or download the podcast below:

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Another area IBM is investing heavily in is vertical industry solutions for information models, process models, governance models, SOA solutions, etc. IBM clearly understands the benefits of asset based consulting, and leading with solutions rather than technology. It’s a winning formula.

Some interesting work being done in the research labs includes work from the IBM China Research Lab for putting semantic metadata into the MDM system, and Linkage Discover from the IBM Indian research lab. This system enables BI over multiple data types, integrating structured and unstructured data for more complete analysis. The demo showed how a customer complaint email can be parsed, and joined with relevant information from other databases. Very cool stuff. Over the years I’ve seen a number of very cool projects in the IBM research labs, and most have stayed in the labs. The researchers need to find interest and funding for their work, and need to do a lot of lobbying in order to make it to the product stage. I don’t envy them, but I do enjoy talking to them.

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Two big stories today. First Al Gore getting the Nobel Peace prize which both surprised and delighted me, and then Oracle making a bid for BEA - which did neither. This one has been circulating the rumor mill for quite a while now. Last month the chatter was becoming noiser and it seemed like the time was drawing nearer. However, even though the element of surprise was not present, this is still big news. BEA has issued a statement saying Oracle significantly unvalued the stock. While they will certainly negotiate over price, it seems like it's only a matter of time before BEA falls to acquisition. The writing has been on the wall for a while.

As SOA is slated to become the dominant enterprise platform over the next 5 - 10 years, it is not surprising that the big platform vendors are vying to own the platform. And once the price is right, the BEA stockholders are not going to complain much. In her blog, Elizabeth Book related the reaction of Neil Macehiter of the firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton. Macehiter feels that IBM is the winner here. "Suddenly, customers looking for a middleware backbone that’s independent of their applications suite are left with only one credible candidate." Well there's actually two - TIBCO and Progress (Actional ESB and governance). (There were over 35 independent vendors when I started covering the integration middleware market a dozen years ago.)

But the bottom line is when a market consolidates to the point where only the big players are left, the real loser is market innovation. The small pure play vendors tend to find market niches and provide sometimes disruptive innovations. The large players tend move much more slowly, even when they are selling business agility ;-).

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I recently spoke with Matt Calkins, President and CEO of Appian. Matt (or his PR agency) come up with a BPM Hippocratic Oath. I was intrigued so I took the call and did a podcast.

Listen to or download the 9:32 min. podcast below:

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Now I understand the need for PR (no such thing as bad press, right?), but I'm really not sure about this one. Do no harm is not what I would advise companies when they embark upon BPM. I asked Matt what the inspiration for this oath was and he said he thinks BPM should be growing as fast as ERP was growing in the 1990's, and we need to overcome the obstacles that are impeding its growth. He equates BPM with ERP because they both automate business processes. However, ERP systems are business applications. Back in the 90's the Y2K issue was driving a lot of ERP adoption, as companies were taking the opportunity to replace aging systems rather than investing big bucks in Y2K remediation, which could be dangerous with old brittle systems.

BPM is not a business application itself although it can be used to implement business solutions. It's about orchestrating SOA solutions, optimizing business processes, while reusing existing assets. I really don't see BPM as being the same as ERP nor do I see it replacing ERP.

Matt says one of the ways BPM does harm is not involving all the people. He says BPM should not be used to redesign processes. Processes should be implemented AS IS and then evolve, and no on should be left out. I think he even says that if you change a process it can't evolve. I actually found this position rather unique. Many organizations are using BPM to improve business processes. Probably all organizations have redundancies in their business processes - people rekeying information, redoing work that's already be done elsewhere. Why would you want to duplicate that? Many BPM tools have simulation engines so you can change the process and see if that changes the time or cost equation. Most companies I have spoken with use BPM for the express purpose of changing their processes to make them more efficient. That's the value proposition of BPM.

I think Matt's real point was that it needs to be easy for people to interact with a process and if it's not easy they won't use it. Now that I can buy. But the Hippocratic Oath for BPM? I was not convinced. Were you? Are the issue Matt speaks about the issues you are facing in your BPM implementations?

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I don't usually do gadget blogs, but I just got a new BlackBarry 8820 and I need to share the news. I'm in love. This little thing is actually a bit addictive in fact. I replaced my Treo 650 which kept hanging up on my mother (I swear it really was the phone). In making my decision I of course considered the iPhone, so I'd like to share my findings with you. Your results may vary.

First, the iPhone is definitely very cool. It's the best mobile web browser I've seen. But there are some issues. You can only use their browser which doesn't support flash yet - but I was told by the sales people "it will". In fact that was a familiar refrain in my discussions with them. Despite the commercials where the PC guy is the geek and the Mac guy is cool, these guys were pretty geeky over the iPhone. They just exuded too much enthusiasm.

That was a minor issue. More difficult was the typing. You have to use your finger tip - no nails, no stylus. If you have finger nails, typing is very, very difficult. I found it very slow and inaccurate. It helped somewhat that the phone offers suggestions for words as you are typing. Supposedly the more you use it the smarter the phone gets smarter at recommending words. I called some people I know who have the phone and they all said typing is difficult. That's kind of annoying if you actually want to answer emails on your phone.

For me the ultimate deal killer was the inability to transfer files to the phone and then send the files as email attachments. I did this a few times through Bluetooth on my Treo and it was a life saver when I was on the road with no internet connectivity on my PC. Turns out that now I cannot live without this feature.

The salesman in the AT&T Mobile store told me the BlackBerry 8820 could transfer files via Bluetooth. Well, that turns out to be partially true. Bluetooth works for file transfer and wireless synching if you are connected to an Enterprise BlackBerry server. I am not, so I need to use the USB cable to transfer files and synch with Outlook. One more cord to carry on my trips - not the end of the world. At least I know I can email files through the phone in an emergency.

Here's a picture of my little beauty.

I know the pinching and finger spreading thing on the iPhone is way cool, but the BlackBerry 8820 has this little trackball in the center that is a great way to navigate the screen. One reviewer commented that the keys on the keyboard are flat, not raised buttons. But each key actually has a little rims, and which I find makes typing both fast and accurate - even for women with nails.

The 8820 also has WiFi and I found that very easy to set up. There is one button on the side that you can set to instantly bring you to any function. I set it for email, after first setting if for the phone, then wondered if I should set it to the home screen with all the applications. But then I found that when you are in a different application, pushing the left green phone button to place a call brings you to the phone screen. Pushing the red hang up button on the right automatically brings you to the home screen. So navigating the functions on the phone is very fast and easy.

The phone supports photos and music but you need to install a data card for that functionality. I found a 2 gig micro card for $26, free shipping. It does not have a camera. It does have a GPS, but it's a $5 per month subscription fee. Haven't tried it yet.

I'm very happy with my BlackBerry. Maybe next time I'll be ready for a new phone the iPhone will be ready with more business friendly features. Has anyone else seriously considered the iPhone and decided to pass?

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OK, my office has me giggling this week, bringing out the lighter side of SOA ebizQ is running a survey on how you say the acronym for Service Oriented Architecture. Do you say S-O-A or do you say SOAH?

Joe McKendrick makes a somewhat impassioned plea for everyone to adopt Soah. He equates giving an acronym a word instead of initials raises it to a higher level of importance and argues that Soah is word worthy.
What do you think? We're actually giving away an iPhone for the best response. Take the survey for a chance to win. We've even some gotten poetry. So get creative with your responses.

For some good giggles, check out the new Mumbo Gumbo entry SOA: Stress Away. In this week's installment of the mumbo gumbo comic, our heroes grapple with this important question of how to pronounce SOA, and then play rhyming games - with hilarious results. Check it out. Even better do what I do - subscribe to the RSS feed and don't miss a single installment.

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The authors of SOA for Dummies replied to my review of the book. . There are certainly some points we disagree on, and perhaps this will foster some healthy discussion on terms and technologies that are part of SOA.

The first issue the authors took not on is that I "seem to think that BPM does not require SOA." They state "Initially BPM was a separate development - an evolution of workflow and it actually didn’t require SOA until it embraced web services as reusable components. Nowadays though you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the two are separate. Indeed, the reviewer changes her mind about this a few paragraphs later when she declares how business process monitoring, management, and dashboards increase the business value of SOA. How do they do that if they don’t even require SOA?". Actually I did not change my mind. You absolutely positively can implement BPM without SOA. But while SOA is NOT required, it will certainly accelerate the BPM implementation. Furthermore, implementing BPM on top of SOA will increase business agility. I view these as synergistic, not dependent technologies. What do you think?

Next they conclude "the reviewer is quite wrong" when it comes to adapters and provide a definition from Enterprise SOA. Frankly, I've been covering the middleware space since the term was coined. I remember the introduction of adapters. In fact, it took a while for the industry to settle on the term as some vendors called them adapters, some connectors. Basically, they're used to simplify integration, obviating the need to program to each applications' particular API. As application vendors are starting to provide Web service interfaces, adapters will no longer needed to integrate to these applications. So I still disagree with the authors' assertion "No adapters, no SOA".

I appreciate their explanation of the SOA supervisor. "For the sake of simplification we made the “SOA supervisor” the connecting link be-tween the plumbing and SOA itself. We didn’t invent the idea of the SOA supervisor we simply extrapolated it from products that are early attempts at approaching the problem. Some hoped-for capabilities, such as automated resource provisioning and global optimization of resources cannot be achieved without such a component. Neither can there be any automation of system management services, because ultimately they can only derive from service level monitoring." My problem with the term as they described the capabilities in the book is that the capabilities do not exist today. There are technologies that perform some of these capabilities but instead of explaining the requirements, and the types of technologies that you can actually buy to fulfill these requirements, the authors describe some fantasy software that you cannot buy. I find this misleading and confusing. This is what Richard Akerman, technology architect and information security officer at NRC CISTI, Canada's National Science Library and Publisher, had to say about the SOA supervisor: "I also want to address the SOA Supervisor, and the whole idea of automatically monitoring Service-Level Agreements. I think this is very deep voodoo." . He also calls the chapter on adapters "baloney".

The authors called my critique a deliberate hatchet job. I think that is totally unfair. I started the review by saying "The light and humorous style helps make the information they present very easy to digest. SOA for Dummies achieves this tone. I admire the clever chapter and section titles such as “Noah’s Architecture”, “I never metadata I didn’t like” or “Talkin ‘bout My Federation”. It also presents the business concepts and benefits clearly. It’s written well, and enjoyable to read." After all, that is the purpose of the book - to entertain while educating. Now it's up to you to discern whether the book has more pros than cons. Attend the SOA in Action virtual conference Oct. 30 & 31st for a chance to win a copy of the book. Then let us know what you think.

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I recently read SOA for the Business Developer by Ben Margolis with Joseph L. Sharpe. Ben Margolis is an IBM Advisory Writer and has more than 20 years of experience as a writer and programmer. This book provides a clear overview of the standards SOA developers need to understand, including XML, XPath, BPEL, SCA, and SDO. Written by a developer for developers, it quickly gets to "how" these standards are implemented within an environment, rather than just defining what the standards are and what they do.

The one question I was left with was whether a single SOA developer needs to know how to program to ALL of these standards. If so, then it might look like a daunting task to those looking to transition into SOA development.

For example, most of the tools today can generate BPEL code from a model. I can imagine there might be some circumstances where developers might want to tweak the code (after all, they always do), but I don't think it's necessary that every developer need know how to code in BPEL. Similarly, while SOA developers need to understand the evolving technologies and standards, most development tools today will create a WSDL interface with a mouse click - no coding necessary.

Even if a SOA developer is not using all the standards, this book is a helpful guide to all the standards they are likely to run into, and certainly deserves a place on the business developer's SOA bookshelf. However, it probably won't serve as their bible. Developers also need to understand what to put behind the WSDL and how to measure and quantify the business benefits of the services they develop. Otherwise the true benefits of SOA will not be realized and developers will use new languages to develop the same way they have in the past.

Next on my bookshelf is Tomas Erl's SOA Princlples of Service Design. Review to follow.

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