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Governance in SOA has been the subject of much discussion -- a trend some analysts say is a sign of the technology's movement to a more mature phase. And Web 2.0 is another interesting trend that opens up SOA possibilities.

Kelly Emo, an SOA product marketing manager with HP Software, has some particular interest in the state of SOA governance -- and she'll be speaking on this issue in a presentation called "Enterprise Mash-Ups for Wall Street: Leveraging SOA Web 2.0" at the Web Services SOA on Wall Street show set for February 11.

"I just see it’s such an exciting and dynamic area right now," she says.

Two Key Waves for IT

Emo predicts that two major waves are "coming to shore for IT" right now. The first is SOA, with surveys putting adoption rates at 40 to 60 percent of enterprises having SOA in a pilot phase or business deployment. She also cites a few surveys that indicate over 70 percent of CIOs have SOA plans for 2008.

"It definitely hit the mainstream in terms of thinking about it and planning for it," she comments.

The other wave is Web 2.0, which makes for an interesting time for IT. IT departments are dealing with "meaty back office problems" but end users are sometimes too impatient to wait for IT departments and their planning processes, and so they take their needs into their own hands with new approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration.

Hero or Zero

At this point, Emo jokes that IT has the opportunity to become the hero or the zero based on whether it chooses to embrace this capability. If they do not, then they are more likely to run into issues. Emo hopes instead that IT will embrace the new "Wild West of Web 2" but pay attention to governance.

Implicit Governance

Emo thinks there's a desire for back office environments to become service oriented -- enabling the infrastructure to be governed and allowing parts to be exposed in mashable services, and in order to create these applications, IT needs a sense of control.

"Even though they can’t predict how many consumers they’re going to have out there in the Web 2 world, they can know how many they’re able to support and they manage as the load comes in when they need to allocate more resources," she explains.

Emo calls that concept implicit governance. Consumers are not aware of the governance process but are assured of getting the services they expect, while IT is also able to get ahead of the curve and be ready to offer support.

How to Orchestrate Governance

Emo has some examples for how this works in action. Say, for example, a company has back office applications that support the sales department and wants the ability to expose those to the sales department in order to create situational applications.

That company can put in technology to the back end to support security and performance along with testing capabilities that feed into the governance process, then determine the kinds of loads that the systems will support. Then, when exposing services as mashables, they place a contract between the consumers in WYSIWYG style.

"What IT can now do, because they’ve got this governance platform in place, is they can track proactively how many consumption events are taking place and what kind of traffic they’re seeing and they can get ahead of the curve," she says.

Companies could also do things like track traffic to create policies to deprovision customers that aren't using the system in order to free up capability for others.

"Think about if you wanted to allow new channels for your products or services and creative mash-ups to deliver information about your products into whole new markets where they’ll want to place orders," she says. "

I mean, that could just explode worldwide."

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The company name certainly catches one's eye -- and that's partly why Wowza Media Systems chose it.

"We want to get the 'wow' into video, not only from an eye popping perspective where you see great video but also from a price and performance perspective," says David Stubenvoll, CEO and co-founder of Wowza. "I’ve been speaking with someone and when I’ve mentioned our latest pricing, they’ve responded 'WOW – za!' so it’s a perfect name."

About Wowza

Wowza launched its flagship Wowza Media Server Pro nearly a year ago, and since then the company has racked up more than 4,400 global licenses and won awards. Customers include everyone from content delivery networks (CDNs) to service providers, and even the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Department store giant Macy's is also using the product as a part of its internal training functions.

But Wowza's product was actually created as an accident. Stubenvoll and co-founder Charlie Good left Adobe and began a simple video blogging solution that wrapped Flash Media Server with a WordPress core and ran into problems when the server wouldn't work as they wanted. They also were unhappy with the price. End result: they wrote their own server.

"While our initial service didn’t exactly rock the world, people started asking us about our server and we had our first sale of the server in 20 minutes of a first phone call," Stubenvoll muses.

After re-architecting the system with an industrial strength product in mind, Wowza Media Server was born -- the only independent media server company out there, Stubenvoll points out. Future plans are to offer customers video capabilities that will go to any device on any platform with any video codec -- and this is all with a piece of code only about a megabyte in size.

Service Providers Using Wowza

One company currently using Wowza is Interroute, a large fiber owner in Europe. Interoute does VoIP but also CDN and similar services. Yonden Media Works, StreamGuys, and Nacamar are a few other providers using the service.

Wowza also has a product for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which is like a hybrid type of SaaS -- the company licenses the software along with hosting services and bandwidth at a price paid to Amazon. Customers using Wowza Pro through the program can basically use the same functionality as those using Wowza in an on-premise installation.

"The great thing and the compelling thing about these EZ2 platform is that it allows you to easily add and delete servers so you can expand and contract as your needs require and the bandwidth," he points out.

Competition with Adobe and Microsoft

Stubenvoll says Wowza sees itself as the agnostic player in the media server market.

"Flash is tremendous. Silverlight is great. Java is wonderful. And, as we’re getting towards this notion of convergence, I want to see my Heroes whether it’s through my living room or on my desktop or on my mobile phone," he says.

In today's world with disparate systems and media servers that serve the client, publishers need to release disparate systems to meet needs, but Stubenvoll says that Wowza will make it so that publishers can use the same servers for all of those outlets. Wowza can facilitate combination with software from Adobe and support phones powered by Java running Silverlight.

"In the end, I think we are going to be a boost to each of these systems and I would say our relationship with these companies today is cordial," he asserts.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson 

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Web 2.0 applications offer a great way for businesses to boost agility by finding new and more interesting ways to reach customers -- but without a clear and well thought-out strategy, Web 2.0 can easily become a Mess 2.0.

Prakash Sinha, a product manager with Cisco, recently joined ebizQ to discuss the strategies he shared in a webinar entitled How the Internet's Largest Bookstore Mashes SOA and Web 2.0.

Where to Develop Web 2.0 Applications

According to Sinha, the network is actually the most logical place to develop Web 2.0 apps -- and he cited Netscape and Google as proof.

Both were both key companies in changing the way user-facing applications are written; as Sinha notes about Google's introduction of Ajax.

"What these technologies did was take all the applications from the data center and web-enabled them," he says. "And now, with the Google revolution, it’s actually creating these rich Internet applications based on these Ajax and JavaScript object innovation technologies."

Mashups and remix applications are another example. These applications create traffic on the network and demonstrate the need to scale and secure the infrastructure. Layer 4 through layer 7 are changing, and the network is also changing, to become more application-aware and application fluent, he points out.

Proof of Concept for Web 2.0

Sinha cites another case example in a Cisco customer that offers the largest bookstore in the world and had fulfillment channels that it wanted to reuse. The customer had a large competitor based in the West Coast and needed to reduce its cost of doing business, so the customer ended up creating new storefronts on its infrastructure, as well as partner storefronts. In order to mediate challenges, such as not being able to control security for partners, the customer used Cisco technology to meet these needs and grow business.

Architecture and User Interaction

For this particular customer, a particular innovation was one-click ordering and facilitation of interaction with partners. But can something like that be architected into business and development processes?

"Architecture is a key component of how you design how the user interacts with your systems," he says.

One-click ordering is a great example because it reduces the amount of clicks a user needs to do and enables customization of the user experience, making it easier for the customer to navigate the website and reducing latency of the interaction.

"That's one of the key things you should look for when you're architecting an infrastructure for user facing," he points out.

Five Steps to Network Nirvana

And speaking of architecture, Sinha also points out that a simpler architecture can be key in order to deliver a flexible architecture with consistent policies. Simpler makes governance easier and enables faster development.

The following are Sinha's recommendations for the key things to look for from a network perspective:

• How to virtualize service endpoints
• How to secure these endpoints
• How to deliver the scalable and highly reusable services
• How to offload (because reuse is the key goal and utilization and improving utilization is a key goal)
• How to accelerate and offload this processing because you want to reduce the latency for the user and then of course, management is a key goal as well
• How to create some policy driven IT infrastructure so that it’s easier to manage.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson 

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According to Lyndsay Wise, a BI analyst who just launched her own WiseAnalystics Web site, BI is really starting to make its mark in the mid-market.

"There are about three ways that market consolidations are changing the face of business intelligence deployments," Wise explains. The first is that consolidations are leading to embedded BI within vendors' service offerings -- or at least readily available adapters. Smaller and newer entrants are bringing best-of-breed solutions and giving organizations more choice. And last, but not least, the expansion of BI towards SaaS means that hosted offerings can be deployed at a departmental level.

Benefits and Pitfalls

Two key benefits of having numerous choices is obviously, well, there's more choice. Organizations that don't have large budgets or IT infrastructures can choose among the available solutions to find the most appropriate.

"Larger vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos are creating not only mid-market solutions but on-demand solutions as well, so that organizations in the mid-market arena that cannot afford or don't necessary want even a mid-market solution can still get the benefit of these leading vendors but through an on-demand service," she says.

As for challenges, the consolidations bring in more doubt in terms of which offerings will remain available in the next year.

"Organizations won't really know until next year whether or not the vendors that have been acquired will actually still have a role at their own development and their market positioning, etc," Wise says.

Newer entrants can also face viability questions from not having as much of a proven track record.

BI and SaaS / Open Source Development

Both SaaS and open source are becoming more mainstream, and BI has a definite parallel.

"A couple of years ago, it was really only open source organizations or companies or developers that were interested in open source that knew about open source BI solutions," she says. "But now we see that based on different marketing efforts and just expansions in general into the area, that open source vendors are actually becoming more mainstream within BI."

On-demand has the same story. What was once more of a fringe movement is now becoming far more mainstream.

"I think that both open source as well as SaaS-based solutions will continue to expand and become more popular within the BI arena," Wise predicts. "Especially in terms of mid-market solutions because so many mid-market companies don't have really advanced or mature IT infrastructures, it makes sense that they would go towards an on-demand solution."

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson 

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Business can feel like a war sometimes, so it's no surprise that the ancient classic "Art of War" by Sun Tzu has relevance to the corporate world.

The Warfare Metaphor of Business

"Let’s look at what the business environment is about. It’s about competition," says Richard Platt, Intel's former corporate innovation program manager and senior instructor for innovation methods. "Warfare is really the ultimate competition."

Warfare, like business, has guidelines and rules and principles though -- and business can be Darwinian with survival of the fittest and most adaptable companies.

It's important in using this metaphor, however, to understand that business warfare is not against customers but about winning hearts and minds and gaining competitive advantage. It's about market share and influence in the mind of the customer.

Survival of the Fittest in Business

A researcher named Langdon Morris performed analysis of Fortune 500 and Forbes 100 companies over the past several decades and discovered some interesting trends. Morris found that between 1979 and 1983 that one third of the Fortune 500 went out of business or fell off the list and that the list had a 6% annual turnover. The Fortune 100 was almost as bad.

If you extrapolate the data, says Platt, and Project it forward, you find an interesting trend. Authors Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan have predicted that only a third of today's major corporations will survive as businesses for the next 25 years; most will die or be bought out and absorbed.

"The reality is that we’re looking at drastically compressed planning horizons for every company and the need for fast response," he concludes. The root cause of the dropoff is the adaptability issue, just as the best fighters tend to survive a war.

Using Warfare Strategies in Business

So what does this all have to do with the Art of War? Sun Tzu said that the highest form of competing is to win without fighting. In business, that means winning customers' hearts and minds and to compete where competitors are not. One tool for accomplishing the latter is called the Blue Ocean Strategy of seeking calm waters, which contrasts with the Red Ocean strategy of sailing into bloody water.

Another tool, to resort to a military analogy, which be the OODA Loop, which was developed by an Air Force colonel. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

"If we look at this from an agility standpoint, we’re really looking at culture, organizational culture, and a climate of trust that actually encourages people to actually use their initiative and further the goals of the organization," Platt says.

For more on the metaphor and for specific examples of techniques like the OODA Loop in action, be sure to listen to the entire podcast.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson

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