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New Podcast, "The SOA Report," this week: SOA and Data and Step 2 of my 12 Steps to SOA

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Ronan Bradley did a great job in his recent post: Data: The heart of SOA.

“Within a SOA, the data models built are then exposed through the service definitions. The requesting applications must either formulate the request using the data model of the service provider or more commonly rely on an intermediary such as an ESB to bridge the gap (something I refer to as mediation)..”

Certainly, data is the heart of any information system, including SOA. Indeed, semantic mediation, transactional binding, exception management, and certainly abstraction are all in that mix as well. However, I put forth that the real value of SOA goes well beyond the data when considering the true value of services.

Truth-be-told, services can be anything really. They can abstract data, they can produce or consume data, even restrict access to data. However, considering the notion of reuse, the most ROI from the creation of services is the ability to provide true behavior or more simply put: application functions with data bound to those functions.

For instance:

Calculate_Risk();
Validate_Credit():
Is_Address_Real();

In my now outdated EAI book (that continues to sell well by the way), I called this method vs. information integration, pointing out the differences between simple information replication and mediation, versus dealing with true application behavior. Today I call this service-oriented integration versus information-oriented integration, and point out many of the same differences.

While data is always there, the heart of a SOA needs to be services that represent both information and behavior. Services that represent data are clearly required, but the real value of SOA is providing the architect and the developer with the ability to mix and match application services to create and refine business solutions, data is only a part of the story there.

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New Podcast, "The SOA Report," this week: SOA Adoption and Step 1 of my 12 Steps to SOA

Thanks,

Dave

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I’ve seen some strange things recently, while the SOA world is booming, best described in Joe’s blog “Dot-SOA Boom” the old school *EAI guys don’t seem to be joining in the party. Indeed many are finding falling sales, or not showing the growth of the upstart SOA guys. Could this be a trend?

I pointed out in my “other blog” that there are really two camps: SOA Old School and SOA New School, and there seems to be a chasm between the two that keeps growing.

“Old school SOA vendors are those with "legacy" integration or application development solutions that "SOA-tized" their stuff, basically adding Web services interfaces, enhanced security, etc.. I've been here before, you're working with an existing product and existing customers, and suddenly a new wave comes along, you have to keep up, thus you add another layer onto your existing product to make it a bit more acceptable to the market, and also maintain backward compatibility with your existing customer base. It's not easy.”

In fact many are finding that the more traditional *EAI technology is coming up short when you consider the new complexities of SOA. I think that SOA is being defined by the marketing machines in the well funded upstarts, and the older guys are finding that they are being made obsolete. No matter if it’s perception, or reality. In the world of SOA, it really does not seem to matter right now. They hype cycle is raging.

So, is this a trend? Are the older integration guys with old products, thousands of customers, and yes, gulp, profitable, able to keep up with the young Turks who seem to be defining the market now? Tough to say, but it does not look good when considering the current set of events, including a growing market and declining or slow growing sales with a few of the players.

Perhaps the core issue is innovation. While a commodity in the newer venture funding startups that don’t need to declare an EPS, are just cost to the larger companies, and thus to be avoided. Cost that must be managed, perhaps at their peril, and thus you end up in a an bit of a death spiral…meaning you can’t spend the money because sales are lacking, and sales are lacking because you can’t spend the money, (sounds like I’ve lived this before, eh?).

The reality is that these guys have a clear opportunity; however they will have to act more like a startup, perhaps beating down The Street on EPS, and funding higher-risk, by higher-value projects. No guts, no glory. I’ve learned that over the years.

* While I’m using the term “Traditional EAI” here, I really don’t like that term to describe a set of technology, but when in Rome… Indeed, EAI is an architectural notion, defining the approaches, methodologies, and technologies behind information system synergy, and the basis for modern SOA notions. Just had to get that off my chest.

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SOA Report Podcast...Can Traditional EAI Tech Support SOA?

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It has been a clear trend in the world of SOA to customize solutions for particular problem domains, such as vertical industries. This means providing specific connectors, formats, transformation, and behaviors that have value for verticals such as finance, manufacturing/retail/distribution (MRD), telecommunications, health care, and other areas that have particular SOA requirements, inter- or intracompany.

Typically, vertical SOA solutions are built around standards such as RosettaNet, UCCnet, and ebXML for MRD; HIPPA for health care; as well as GSTP, Omgeo, and SWIFT for finance. However, we’ll spend the most time on supply chain integration as a concept, which is becoming more important as we move closer to the real-time economy.

Clearly, middleware and Web services is taking on properties that are more business application-like, something that flies in the face of the traditional middleware role of linking one application to the next. At the time middleware first appeared, EAI had not yet emerged as a new set of technologies and a new discipline, so the notion of domain-specific middleware seemed a bit far-fetched.

Today, it’s a new world. As we look to add more value to SOA, many SOA technology vendors have announced their movement into more vertical domains, including finance, health care, and manufacturing.

So, why create vertical-specific subsystems using SOA? It’s really about providing more out-of-the-box value to the end user, moving well up the stack to business process and logic layers, and creating reusable behavior applicable to a vertical business domain such as finance, health care, manufacturing/retail/distribution (MRD), and telecom. Moreover, specific standards-based connectivity and transformation solutions provide value, such as HIPPA processing for health care, or GSTP (Global Straight Through Processing) TFM (Transaction Flow Manager) connections for finance. We can also add supply chain integration to that list using standards such as ebXML, RosettaNet, and EDI.

The merger of SOA technology and vertical-specific applications and SOA standards is a natural evolution. Indeed, most SOA technology vendors are working toward providing common SOA infrastructure along with specific vertical extension. Sometimes these are mere libraries of code but services are better, sometimes completed bolt-on or stand-alone applications. The objective is to provide additional value to the end user, making the SOA technology that much more valuable.

As we move forward we are going to see these “high-in-the-stack” vertically aligned applications become more widespread, and with the rise of vertical standards, such as HIPPA and STP, these will become even more important. The downside is the additional complexity, and the fact that many need to get their own SOA house in order before attempting to move towards vertical solution. You have to move up the stack, never down the stack.

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SOA Report Podcast...SOA 2.0 and Data Integration and SOA

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