Gartner's Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit topped the SOA news this week, and ebizQ was all over the story. ebizQ Jessica Ann Mola talked to vendors on the scene, and provides details on new announcements from SOA Software about its SOA-Cloud "Atmosphere" initiative, and to the folks at GXS about its B2B e-commerce and integration services, and impending merger with Inovis, another B2B services provider.
(Does this mean SOA Software add "Cloud" to its name?)
Kelly Emo also provided insights arising out of AADI, particularly the growing fusion (or confusion) between SOA and cloud. "One
of the key themes at this event was the rapid adoption and evolution of
Cloud Computing and a recurring theme was how SOA is contributing to
the realization of Cloud solutions -- both Services and Platforms that are becoming ready for prime time," Kelly observes.
But, both have distinct roles to play. As Kelly puts it, "when
I hear cloud computing and SOA converging it's kind of like saying a
looming rain storm and a forecast for large surf are converging --both
will impact my day on the beach and both may amplify the felt effects
of the other, but one does not take the place of the other. In my
opinion, SOA is being adopted widely in the market, with or without
cloud, as SOA is an architectural approach that makes sense for certain
infrastructure and application projects."
(So SOA and Cloud are like a day at the beach, or what?)
Brenda Michelson was also on the scene at AADI, and describes a panel discussion that reviewed SOA success stories the SOA Consortium had identified a couple of months back. For example, John Woolbright, CIO for Omega Financial described his company's evolution: "Started with centralized strategy, enterprise (shared) ESB. Learned
that a federated approach, with well-defined domains of control, and
well-defined standards, was a better approach. So, EA approach, but
not centralized strategy. EA provided investment protection, such as
establishing contracts with key vendors. Having well defined service
standards saved them money in contracting the development of services."
(The Federation rules... But we knew that.)
ebizQ community contributors also had plenty to say on other issues as well. John Crupi, who launched an enterprise mashup blog here at ebizQ last month, just debunked seven misconceptions about mashups.
For example, John says mashups are not based on browser interactions ("they are not efficient at processing and
combining significant amounts of data. This is a job that rightly
belongs to the servers") and that they are maps, a la Google Maps. "In my
experience, most enterprise mashups aren't maps but charts, tables or
other decision-support style formats." He also debunks the idea that enterprise mashups are entirely user cerated without intervention from IT. "Enterprise Mashups access data inside the data center and IT owns the datacenter," he observes.
(Sorry, IT folks, looks like you have to get involved in this one...)
Dion Hinchcliffe asks if SOA will be more a part of open source than commercial products. As he put it, "open source solutions can provide real value to SOA efforts today, both
in terms of reductions in up-front cost as well as other the attendant
benefits of open source including the ability to directly influence
product evolution, more transparent architecture, as long as its
functional strengths in service fabric are clearly understood and
respected." However, commercial SOA products aren't going away anytime soon -- they still have more robust capabilities, especially when it comes to governance.
(Unless you're governing off a spreadsheet or a wiki -- but that means you have more basic issues to contend with.)
Michael Poulin took a foray into apparently not-too-well-charted territory, identifying SOA best practices in his latest post. Michael is always a forceful proponent of laying out the business case for SOA, and does so here, urging that " service granularity is driven by the business functionality, and service aggregation be done not for the sake of granularity, but for addressing particular business needs." All too often, these practices occur as part of IT optimization.
(To paraphrase a well-worn phrase, the business of SOA is... business.)
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