More on ESBs and 'Rats Nests' of Point-to-Point Services

EbizQ has just posted a transcript of my recent Webcast with IBM's Leif Davidson is now available for perusal.

Some highlights of our discussion:

Leif Davidson on how SOA always starts off with good intentions, but...

"The past history of the whole IT business has shown what happens when there is no control, you know, as we talked about earlier in terms of creating rat’s nest. Everybody, you know, no one comes in with the intention of how can I make things more complicated and less flexible. Everyone starts off with good intentions and, you know, an SOA project whether it’s done by one team or, you know, 21 teams in a business could be done with the best intentions but could end up the with a mess."
"And I think SOA’s particularly that way if you think about what it actually means in the business sense; these composite applications, invoking services from across and beyond your business. If you don’t actually have control from the very early days of SOA, you’ve now got a much more dynamic flexible business and much more dynamic and flexible access across your business to your IT. If you don’t have that sort of sense of control and ownership and governance its probably the right word, then I think you do risk much more than in a traditional IT infrastructure."

Yours truly on impending SOA growth:

"We find [in our survey of 244 companies] that organizations are really ramping up their SOA initiatives. There’s going to be a lot of steady growth for SOA. We actually looked at companies -- we actually looked at the number of services, the number of enterprise services being shared or reused. They intend to deploy large numbers of services. By next year this time, according to what our respondents are telling us, those companies with more than 25 services will jump dramatically, the percentage of companies from 24% to 39% over the next 12 months."
"The growth -- this growth in businesses that are crossing this threshold into multiple critical mass of services, 25 or more services is a significant number because once they cross this threshold they need to start treating SOA as a critical strategy and need to address -- start addressing many aspects, the management, and policy enforcement aspects, for example. Connecting up their mission critical services becomes an important priority."

Leif on federated ESBs:

"A Federated ESB is really a logical step from what we’ve talking about having separate ESB’s to meet different departmental and project needs. As you see on this chart any different department may have its own ESB but that doesn’t actually get away from the needs for all of those ESBs to deliver common capabilities but by the integration across different departments. And so the Federated ESBs really allowing businesses to select multiple different ESBs but allowing them to work together to provide common capabilities across that disparate infrastructure.

Click here for the Webcast; here for the transcript.

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