October 2006 Archives

Web services security standards have been proliferating in recent years, but SOA security is still a murky area. Among standards, the brightest light is WS-Security. However, the most recent Evans Data Web services survey finds that only seven percent of... Read More..

Since I began this blog almost two months ago, I have mainly focused on the internal integration aspects of Web services and SOA. That's where everyone's attention is these days. However, there is just as much to talk about with... Read More..

Who said SOA couldn't scale to Monstrous proportions? Monster, the job-search site, recently expanded its reach to 24 countries across the globe, and built a service oriented architecture that would stretch across separate regional units. Read More..

There's been a lot of heated discussion lately within the industry on whether reuse can drive the value of service-oriented architecture, or whether the concept has flopped. I recently had the opportunity to join fellow ebizQ bloggers Elizabeth Book, Ronan... Read More..

Clearly, there's something for every industry in service-oriented architecture. However, financial services and telecommunications -- which have products and services heavily wrapped up in information technology -- have been leading the way in SOA, as they have in most other... Read More..

Fellow ebizQ blogger James Taylor sees a growing convergence between the service delivery architecture enabled through SOA and business process outsourcing -- especially as it relates to the delivery of business analytics capabilities. He also cites a new report from... Read More..

SOA is a multi-year journey, not an overnight sprint. In my last post, I described Commonwealth Bank's gradual, success-by-success approach to SOA. Along that same theme, British Airways (BA) also advises that wider use of its budding SOA could still... Read More..

Moving into SOA involves the orchestration of many combinations of services and technologies that can deliver an endless range of new applications to the business. Given all the messages bombarding the market, one can be forgiven for thinking that the... Read More..

The title on Ronan Bradley's recent post, "FBI Accuses Some SOA Vendors" caught my eye, thinking that maybe more vendor CEOs got caught "pretexting" board members and journalists. Or, perhaps they were simply being accused of inflating customer expectations about... Read More..

Why do some organizations seem to excel at SOA, even in the earliest stages, while others have a hard time struggling with it? Ken Vollmer, analyst with Forrester Research and a keynoter for ebizQ's upcoming SOA in Action virtual conference,... Read More..

Last week, I posted details from the latest ebizQ survey that demonstrated a that runtime automation tools greatly improved overall satisfaction with SOA governance efforts. What, exactly, is at the root of this satisfaction? Dan Foody, CTO of Actional and... Read More..

Often, committees are the best way to slow down and obfuscate things. But when it comes to SOA, you may want a committee to interject itself between service creators and your registry. A committee with teeth may be the best... Read More..

Microsoft clarified its service-oriented architecture stance at its recent SOA and Business Processes Conference in Redmond. The vendor -- which has led the way with most of the prominent Web services standards that have morphed into the primary SOA enablers... Read More..

One of the classic pieces of advice that gets applied to many technology or business endeavors is not to try to "boil the ocean." The same applies to building out service-oriented architecture. Many success stories so far have started developing... Read More..

In my last post, I talked about ebizQ's latest survey of 313 enterprises, which reflected the state of governance within budding SOAs. (Listen to the Webinar here.) As Beth Gold-Bernstein so aptly put it, "the press may be starting to... Read More..

Most companies that have functioning SOAs in place are pretty sour on the state of their governance solutions. While about 17 percent say their governance is sufficent, another 40 percent say it is not sufficient. The rest aren't quite sure... Read More..

More and more frequently, it's getting to the point where you can't talk about Software as a Service without invoking SOA, and, likewise, SaaS is becoming a larger part of SOA conversations. Many of you may already be users of... Read More..

Ameriprise Financial's credo is "dream, plan, and track." The brokerage and financial planning firm, which was spun off from American Express a year ago, has always emphasized a long-term or lifecycle approach to managing customer accounts. "Dream, plan, and track"... Read More..

For years, one of the big complaints about ERP -- and other enterprise software packages -- is that once installed, business processes would have to be bent, twisted, and reshaped to conform to the software, and not visa-versa. Ideally, SOA... Read More..

How is SOA being received out in the trenches? A couple of recent conferences have brought forth both good news and bad news about the state of acceptance of SOA by technology professionals. Okay, let's get the bad news out... Read More..