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If the idea of carving up an SOA strategy sounds a little ghastly, ebizQ is scaring up some help this Halloween with the SOA in Action Virtual Conference. One of the keynotes for the conference, scheduled for October 31, is "Building a Strategic and Tactical Platform for SOA" with Forrester Research's Randy Heffner. Heffner joined ebizQ's Gian Trotta recently to offer a preview and some quick tips on SOA strategy.

SOA Misconceptions (or Tricks)

Web services and SOA are not the same thing, says Heffner, and viewing the two concepts that way tends to lead companies down the wrong path to a series of other pitfalls and tricks.

"Instead, view SOA as a broad set of design concepts centering on your major business processes and transactions,  and view Web services as one set of application-to-application communication protocols by which to access your services," he explains.

Another idea that follows that one is the idea that SOA is a technology only. That's a very small view of SOA, says Heffner, and what's more important is the idea of SOA as a business design to enable strategic transformation and flexibility to optimize processes, which is the higher level view of SOA.

And you don't necessarily need to buy loads of new products that break the bank in order to do SOA, he continues. "While it's true that you may eventually buy enterprise services buses and SOA management and repositories and appliances and such, you may well be able to get started on SOA and achieve strong business benefits without buying anything new."

SOA Truths (or Treats)

No one wants tricks, so how about some treats? Heffner says there are plenty of them in SOA. "The real treat within an SOA registry repository solution is not the registry, but the workflow and the service lifecycle tools around the repository," he states. That's what gets you a start on what makes SOA successful -- strong governance and organizational maturity to use a repository in the right way.

Considering SOA and Web services management, the real treat is visibility into the service implementation layer, says Heffner. A management product that looks only at requests and responses leaves you in the lurch if you need to troubleshoot something at the Java component or .Net component layer.

In an enterprise service bus, the treats may vary by the product but nearly all of them give you a unified access point for your services, he says, which gives you control over how services are accessed and how routing and various specifications are handled. And SOA testing tools give you strong and repeatable testing -- crucial as your company evolved and upgrades.

Heffner's Upcoming Keynote

Sound interesting? Heffner will be discussing all this and more in greater depth at his upcoming keynote.

"What we'll talk about in that presentation is focusing on the strategic view of your SOA platform," he says. "So, in some sense, starting with a more theoretical view in, 'Well, what are we aiming at? What do we want to get to with our strategic SOA platform?'"

A problem many companies encounter is how to get there while juggling different SOA projects on conflicting application platforms with different requirements and priorities for the infrastructure. And in order to put all that together, companies need a strong model for the SOA platform.

"You have to move towards that model by leveraging each project as a tactical step in a longer-term evolution towards that strategic platform," he says. "So in that session, I'll give the audience an overall view of what a strategic SOA platform is, what its major functions are, how some of the product categories of SOA infrastructure are playing out."

So in order to learn more about how to battle your company's SOA monsters, be sure to check back in to the SOA in Action Virtual Conference on October 31.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson

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