SOA in Action Blog

Webcast: Looking at Event Processing from Both Sides Now

2010-02-08T17:32:53Z

What is the difference between a business transaction and an event?

It depends on your perspective, but there really is no difference, according to Roy Schulte, distinguished analyst for Gartner. "An entire business process instance may be known to a BPM person as a transaction, but would be known to an event processing person as a business event."

Why is this important? Because businesses are increasingly looking to event processing to guide their decision making, and this calls for a robust BPM strategy.

I recently had the opportunity to join Roy and Oracle's Maneesh Joshi in a new ebizQ Webcast on the business value of event processing, and the growing role of continuous intelligence.

Roy pointed out that within a BPM-enabled environment, focused on workflow, orchestration, and rules, events take the form of steps within business processes. "A business process.. will be started by an event, something happening in the real world that will trigger the execution of the first step in the business process." Events may also trigger other steps along the way within the process, he adds.

But he wanted to make it clear that these are the same things to both BPM and event managers. "Whether you look at an event process from a BPM point of view or event point of view -- in many cases it depends on your background and what you're most familiar with -- but you are describing the same thing. This doesn't mean that all business processes use events in the same way. Some business processes make use of event driven architecture and event objects in different ways."

Roy is co-author of a new book on event processing, titled "Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies," with Dr. K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology,

Roy and Maneesh's complete Webcast is available for viewing.

InterContinental Hotels' SOA-based Initiatives Earn 'Wow' Rating

2010-02-04T17:06:31Z

The deployment of cloud-based customer service contact centers, based on SOA standards, enables a leading hotel chain to maintain consistency and scale.

Blair Pleasant recently sat in on the Customer Innovation Awards presentation at the most recent Genesys/Alcatel Lucent Enterprise Application Group analyst conference, and a hotel chain's SOA-based customer care center rated as one of the "Wow" innovations cited.

Bill Peer, vice president of enterprise architecture for InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) described how technology helps elevate customer service to the highest levels in the industry. "You don't simply push data/information at a guest, you envelop them in the system," he is quoted as saying. "They are more than part of the ecosystem, they are its center."

The company is working on a mobile communications channel to customers it calls "Virtually Me." Virtually Me will be available within the next four years, and will enable customers to transmit and share personal information, such as musical tastes or health information, via their mobile device, which can notify the hotel property to provide information that can help improve the guest's stay.

To accomplish this, IHG is integrating unified communications technology from Genesys with its business processes. As Pleasant puts it, "IHG lifted out call routing and logic and placed it in the cloud for all system interactions. It built a Web browser-based thin client providing access to all of its CRM systems for handling calls. These hybrid cloud-based services, in conjunction with SOA-based services, let IHG set up a contact center any where in the world quickly and easily."

The result, Pleasant writes, "is faster technology deployment to the hotels, with the ability to shut on/off contact centers with zero disruption, reducing cost to the hotels."

SOA Roundup: More WOA, More Manageable Governance, More Pay for SOA

2010-02-03T15:57:52Z

The future belongs to WOA, or Web oriented architecture. So it's time to start moving service-oriented technology initiatives in this direction, or get left behind. That's the call from Matt Heinrichs, who just published a feature on the rise of WOA here at the ebizQ site.

With this comes a new form of challenges on a global scale, he says. "Most sites are no longer a standalone island of functionality, but a conglomeration of many disparate services, including analytics, geo-location, search, product catalogs, shipping, currency exchange, translation, social network sharing, and streaming. Previously, these functions were baked into each application that needed them. These are now calls to functionality that a dedicated team on the other side of the planet is spending their days and nights to provide."

Kelly Emo makes some solid points about the role of governance in controlling the explosion of information, data and services across organizations. She provides this advice when getting started: governance doesn't have to be a mega-enterprise endeavor in itself. "Much like breaking up a large challenge into a series of small steps, governance can start small," she says. "As you determine what you want to modernize, start to think about what policies are going to have the biggest impact on the project's success and start to codify those policies into an automated governance system to guide compliance...this can go a long way."

My colleague Peter Schooff also led a discussion on the skills that are paying off the most for SOA practitioners, in light of a recent Dice.com salary survey that shows IT professionals with "SOA" in their job descriptions are making 37% more than those with no SOA duties. Todd Biske pointed out that possibly, senior IT people are more likely to be engaged in SOA. He notes that companies are willing to pay a premium for IT professionals that understand SOA security technologies (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Trust, X.509, SAML). Scott Morrison added that since SOA requires working with many stakeholders, good customer skills will alsways demand a premium.

Our resident decision-making technology expert, James Taylor, took a detour this week, exploring the issues around legacy modernization. He urges data centers to "replace hard-to-maintain COBOL with easier-to-maintain business rules."

Janne Korhonen, in the meantime, continued his four-part series on this decade's IT challenges, with a discussion on the increasingly important role of enterprise architecture. The emerging extended enterprise requires a holistic approach to management with a framework that bridges the gap between IT and the business. "Once this holistic model of the organization is in place, however, it will enable flexible reassembly of processes, capabilities and services in new, innovative ways," he says. "BPM and SOA bridge the gap between the business processes and application landscape and EA provides visibility into the totality of organizational assets and interdependencies between architectural elements."

Design-Time Governance Lost in the Cloud? The Great Debate Rages

2010-01-30T16:04:24Z

Just when the dust seems to have settled from the whole "SOA is Dead" kerfuffle, our own Dave Linthicum throws more cold water on the SOA/cloud party -- with a proclamation that "Design-time Governance is Dead." (Well, not dead yet, but getting there...)

We've been preaching both sides of governance as the vital core of any SOA effort -- and with good reason. Ultimately, as SOA proliferates as a methodology for leveraging business technology, and by extension, services are delivered through the cloud platform, people and organizations will play the roles of both creators and consumers of services. The line between the two are blurring more every day, and both design-time and runtime governance discipline, policies, and tools will be required.

In a post that raised plenty of eyebrows (not to mention eyelids), Dave Linthicum says the rise of the cloud paradigm may eventually kill off the design-time aspect of governance, the lynchpin of SOA-based efforts. As Dave explains it, with cloud computing, it's essential to have runtime service governance in place, in order to enforce service policies during execution. This is becoming a huge need as more organizations tap into cloud formations. "Today SOA is a huge reality as companies ramp up to leverage cloud computing or have an SOA that uses cloud-based services," he says. "Thus, the focus on runtime service execution provides much more value."

Many of the existing runtime SOA governance players support enough design and implementation capabilities that separate design-time tools are not required, Dave adds.

Todd Biske, enterprise architect extraordinaire and author of SOA Governance: The Key to Successful SOA Adoption in Your Organization, recently weighed in on Dave Linthicum's remarks that cloud computing will soon kill design-time governance. Todd says there is an important role for design-time governance in the cloud, but he says his definitions differ from Dave's.

While runtime governance is very important to cloud computing, it's critical to be able to manage services across their entire lifecycles, from the earliest phases of the service contract, Todd says. The issue may be Dave's definition of design-time governance, which is one many in the industry apply -- the "notion that design-time governance is only concerned with service design and development." Todd notes that governance should actually be thought of in three timeframes; "pre-project, project, and runtime." As he explains it:

"There's a lot more that goes on before runtime than design, and these activities still need to be governed. It is true that if you're leveraging an external provider, you don't have any need to govern the development practices. You do, however, still need to govern the processes that led to the decision of what provider to use; The processes that define the service contract between you and the provider, both the functional interface and the non-functional aspects; and the processes executed when you add additional consumers at your organization of externally provided services."

WebLayers' Jeff Papows disagrees with Dave, stating that "nothing could be further from the truth" in terms of the role of design-time governance in the cloud. In fact, if anything, the rise of the cloud computing paradigm calls for greater attention to design-time governance. As Jeff puts it:

"If we cut corners at the beginning of the development process, we will almost always create gaps in the cloud resulting in the proliferation of bad code and applications. If in fact more services are accessed, sometimes anonymously, from God knows where, in fact the quality of those services now destined to be used and reused must in fact of an even higher quality. Sounds like design time governance to me."

The growing utilization of cloud resources brings forward new design governance challenges, Jeff argues." For example, when and how should cloud resources be used, do they support the proper technologies, functionality and performance we expect?"

Our own Phil Wainewright, expert in all things cloudy and SaaSy, also sought to put things in perspective, with a supportive statement about Dave's prediction: computing blogger at ZDNet:

"I think Dave Linthicum's point was subtler than this. He was saying that, if you don't know where, how or by whom your services are going to be consumed until you've deployed them, then you can't possibly design the governance you'll need in advance. It's only once the service starts running that your monitoring and governance becomes meaningful, as an iterative process that responds to actual, changing usage.

And Layer 7's Scott Morrison points out that Dave's statement is a logical extension of the "SOA is Dead" turn-of-events since January 2009, which calls for a new way of looking at service orientation and service delivery:

"The incendiary nature of is-dead statements often conceal the subtle but important ideas behind them. Dave's declaration is no different. What he's really suggesting is that cloud will rapidly shift the traditional priorities with respect to services governance. In the big SOA era (before Jan 1, 2009), design-time governance was king. It fit nicely into the plan-manage-control discipline underpinning a large enterprise-scale SOA effort. And to support this, tool vendors rushed in and offered up applications to facilitate the process. Run time services governance, in contrast, was often perceived as something you could ignore until later-after all, on-premise IT has reasonably good security and monitoring in place. The technology might be old and the process a little byzantine, but it could tide you over. And if any internal staff were caught accessing services they shouldn't be you could just fire them.

The cloud inverts this priority. If you deploy even one service into the public cloud, you must have runtime service governance in place. That one service needs to be hardened and protected as you would a DMZ-based application. You must have continuous visibility into its operation from the moment you turn it on. Run time governance simply cannot be put off."

US Defense Department Goes 'Primitive;' Fortifies SOAs

2010-01-29T22:05:31Z

I met Dennis Wisnosky, the business mission area chief technical officer and chief architect at the Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer at the US Department of Defense, at last year's SOA Symposium.

Along with incredible charity work, he has been working tirelessly at bringing a common set of standards and protocols to the DoD's procurement and administrative systems, as well as service-oriented principles, and his work is worth emulating across the private sector.

Dennis was recently interviewed by Rutrell Yasin of DefenseSystems.com about the progress of the effort. The problem for the Defense Department's Business Transformation Agency was engineers and developers tended to work in silos, and end up developing systems that duplicate services and have propriety interfaces that can't work easily with other systems.

The solution has been the development of concepts called Primitives, Common Vocabulary and Design Patterns, according to Yasin's report. The Department of Defense Architecture Framework 2.0 is the foundation for architecture Primitives. Primitives are a standard set of viewing elements and associated symbols mapped to the framework's Meta-Model concepts and applied to viewing techniques.

According to Wisnosky, BTA is applying Primitives based on Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Also, "the idea of Primitives fits nicely into service-oriented architecture," Wisnosky said. "SOA represents the first time in the information technology world where it is clear how IT and business fit together. So an SOA pattern made up of Primitives that are associated with business processes could execute those business processes with standard services."

There's been a lot of SOA developments emerging within the US Defense Department. In another piece of news, a new cybersecurity initiative sponsored by the US Air Force seeks to harden service oriented architectures against outside threats.

Sami Lais, writing in Washington Technology, says a five-year, $2.9 million Air Force Research Laboratory award "could change the way DoD -- perhaps the world -- approaches information security."

How is this so? Lais says the USAF's Advanced Protected Services program is gearing up to "enable networks to withstand attacks that are as yet unknown, limit the effectiveness of the attacks, slow the attackers' progress by building multiple layers they have to penetrate, let them diagnose the attack more quickly," and "help them react and recover more quickly and completely."

Jim Loyall of BBN Technologies, chief scientist and program manager on the project, is working with a team that is concentrating on developing new approaches to better protect DoD SOAs against malicious attacks. The team is building extensions to the middleware stacks in SOA, and using strategies such as creating "crumple zones," or proxy layers between the service and users allows different users to share the same services. "Users go into this initial buffer area, where much of the service functionality is repeated," Loyall is quoted as saying. "If an attack succeeds, it'll get some initial success, but it won't go past that proxy layer to the service itself, and other users will be uncompromised by the attack."

'mySOA': Service Orientation for Everybody

2010-01-29T16:48:36Z

There continues to be plenty of questions, and healthy skepticism, out there in trenches about what SOA can and should do for the business. In an interesting new post, William El Kaim talks about a new way to look at SOA, delivered in terms on which the business can readily capitalize.

He calls the concept "mySOA,"which is committed to bringing Agile, governed and sustainable business and technical services across the enterprise, and even beyond (cloud, B2B, etc.). The "my" part of the moniker is there "because the Web 2.0 revolution will make the services more and more used for social interactions, than for point to point conversations." It also introduces a personalization aspect.

El Kaim says that the mySOA approach is based on three pillars: Agility, Governance and Sustainability:

Agility: "Because the business has to be agile to survive in a fast, and flat interconnected world; because our development teams are using SCRUM and moving to agile is so natural; by necessity, because the financial crisis prevented us to have a full fledge SOA project budget for several years.

Governance: "We used governance as a way to support both business and IT new forces, but also as a way to enforce collaboration and alignment. Trust was, as always, a big part of the challenge; since teams had to delegate some of their decision power and accept some rules (for the benefit of all). Agile means also that exceptions management should be part of the governance process DNA."
Sustainability: "SOA will allow for a progressive and sustainable overhauling of functional and technical silos so as to design reusable or versatile services that will be called in various business processes. Sometimes, more than reuse, we will look for the adequate assets to provide value to the business, for an uncertain time. If we have to develop a portlet for enabling a business service to only one particular client (like a CO2 calculator), then we will do it. It could be reused or not, but should be thought to last."

Steve's Business Model: SOA as the 'App Store'

2010-01-28T23:25:39Z

With all the new excitement swirling around Steve Jobs' and company's latest entry into the market, the iPad, perhaps its time to sit back and think about Steve's business model as it relates to the way we acquire services and content. That is, the idea that applications (or services or whatever) are sitting out there in a common catalog, ready for use anytime you need it and send a few dollars/euros/pounds/rupees their way.

Dion Hinchcliffe, also a contributor here at ebizQ, published some thoughts about the app store model and how its shaping our perceptions of how a software delivery system should function.

That is, the app store supports an ecosystem of developers and creators, but acts as a governance mechanism to make sure the crappy and malicious stuff doesn't degrade and contaminate the ecosystem. Apple and Amazon maintain app stores that provide a consistent and reliable source for services and software.

Sounds like the job of SOA in the enterprise, does it not? Let's take another page from the Apple playbook and look at an analogy.

For quite some time, we have talked about the concept of accessing SOA-ready services through public online marketplaces, and how that could shake up the way we approach IT. We're seeing manifestations of this model through cloud computing.

George Ravich, in a ComputerWeekly interview, suggests SOA-based services be made available to enterprise users the way iTunes are available online, ready to plug into a framework. "the SOA service catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the iTunes playlist has had on listening to music."

SOA application lists should provide services -- such as customer authentication -- that can be plugged into a company's "playlist." As Ravich illustrates:

"Prior to the iPod, people listened to songs on a vinyl record or a CD in the order that the publisher determined. If you wanted to play several songs from different albums, it was a complicated and time-consuming activity,. Now, with an iPod, you can take the individual songs you own and create an endless number of play lists. Each song track is reusable in different settings and situations, under the full control of the listener."

"Similarly, prior to SOA, enterprise applications trapped business processes within inflexible workflows. Without extensive IT development the reuse of any single business process became unfeasible within these systems, leading to multiple versions of the same process being developed separately for different applications and channels."

There you have it. Steve Jobs has been thinking SOA all along, he just hasn't said it. Perhaps the SOA world needs a Steve Jobs-like visionary to package and sell SOA in such a fashion. Or, perhaps, we've already been doing it all along -- without all the pizazz and hoopla.

Jobs With SOA Skills Second Highest-Paid Category in New Salary Survey

2010-01-26T15:30:39Z

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Tom Silver, Senior Vice President, North America at career site Dice.com, about the results of a compelling new IT salary survey the company just published. The survey, based on the input of 19,000 IT professionals, carries a lot of credibility due to its large base of responses, along with the fact that it has been conducted annually for about a decade.

The survey found that employers place a premium on SOA-related skillsets. The average rate for IT positions involving service-orientation work at $107,827 a year. This is 37% over the average for all the IT positions covered - $78,845.

SOA skills are the second-highest paid skills found in the survey. Leading the pack were professionals versed in ABAP, or Advanced Business Application Programming ($115,916).

There are other areas where SOA-based practices add to premium skills as well. For example, applications server skills JBoss and WebLogic joined the $100,000 salary ranks with annual salaries topping $101,869 and $100,313, respectively.

Keep in mind that this salary average is a blended average -- covering both staff professionals and managers/executives. Information on professional versus management salary breakouts was not available at the time I spoke with Silver, but, conceivably, managers with SOA in their job descriptions may be making up to 20% more than the $108,000 average, and professionals may be making up to 20% less.

This is the first year that Dice measured the impact of SOA skills on IT jobs, so historical comparisons were not available. Silver noted that SOA was a part of many job classifications, from security engineer to development engineers to IT managers.

He also observes that jobs calling for SOA skills is a relatively small but growing sector of the IT world. "The number of jobs that are looking for SOA skills is still relatively small - we have about 2,100 jobs on the site right now that call for SOA skills," he points out. "That's 2,100 out of roughly 50,000, so gives you an idea as far as the percentage of jobs, which is still relatively small, four percent or so. But this number is up eight percent versus a year ago. The overall number of tech jobs on Dice for the same period year over year is down about 12%."

No data on cloud-related salaries was available at the time of my interview with Silver.In fact, the number of job listings calling for cloud skills was minisculer, about 300 openings at this time. "It didn't pop to the top of our top 10 list, which is a little bit surprising for us," he says.

While much of the Dice survey is based on technical positions, Silver pointed to the fact that he was seeing more demand for business-related skills. "We're seeing more demand for program or project management skills," he says. "And those individuals that have business skills matching and mixing with technology skills as those that are also in demand. It's great if you know how to run the code; but you're even more valuable to your organization if you know how that tech skill fits into overall business strategy."

Silver also has a word of caution for IT employers - the economy is beginning to expand again, and there's a great deal of disenchantment among the IT ranks. "Not surprisingly, coming off of a year like we just came off of, where many tech professionals were asked to do a lot more with a lot less. They're not happy about it. And dissatisfaction overall with their jobs has gone up."

As a result, Silver says, "as the job market starts to improve, those that have particularly in-demand skillsets - like SOA - are going to be looking around. There's a real good chance as the market opens up, those that have those kinds of skills will walk."

"Employers really pushed their people in the last two years. We're warning employers now that retention will become one of the biggest issues in terms of making sure they have required tech professionals they need in order to meet their goals. Retention will become a much much bigger issue going forward."

SOA Roundup: Mastering Master Data Management, Agile's Agility

2010-01-25T16:43:14Z

Service oriented architecture touches many other information technology-related and management initiatives across the enterprise, and we're seeing examples being discussed right here at ebizQ.

Marty Moseley, for one, says Master Data Management -- through a Master Data Service (MDS) -- can help address the potential issue of SOA distributing bad data across the enterprise. In a new feature posted here, he observes that "delivering an enterprise-wide, authoritative source of master data is the role of an MDS. It understands all of the characteristics of enterprise-wide data, matches and links data accurately and automatically between all internal and external data services, and enables the non-invasive, non-disruptive delivery of information to existing business systems via an SOA."

Dave Linthicum also has a few words to say about MDM, noting that "MDM seems to be like 'going to the gym,' for most enterprises. Everyone talks about it, perhaps spends money on it, but few are following through." The next logical phase to advance MDM is via the Semantic Web, he points out.

ebizQ community members also made some interesting points on the relationship between traditional development methodologies and Agile. In the recent forum question, "Are Agile Practitioners Often at Odds with Architecture and Quality Engineering Teams?" posted by Peter Schooff. Mukund Balasubramanian, for one, says the two teams are compatible: "Agile has this fundamental principle of evolving architecture and quality over multiple iterations by staying nimble and focused on working software. In my experience, this principle is NOT at odds with architecture and teams when the architecture is straightforward. With regards to quality engineering, I have always seen Quality teams WELCOMING agile with open arms since the builds are much more frequent and QE involvement starts early in the lifecycle."

Ian Tomlin, in his latest post here at ebizQ, talks about the rise of "social operating systems," which, unlike SOA, "start with 'what matters most' to the consumers of information, and giving these people the capability to form and support their social relationship ties, develop interest groups, share insights and applications."

Michael Poulin has been catching up on his reading, and talks about a new book "Improving Enterprise Business Process Management Systems," by Alexander Samarin, which

makes a strong coupling between BPM and SOA. "When defining term 'process', some operations of a service can be implemented as a process, and a process includes services in its implementation." So, when you read about processes in this book, you may mean services."

SOA's Seven Greatest Mysteries Unveiled

2010-01-24T16:33:28Z

Last fall, a group of us set about to better define the true meaning of service orientation and SOA, and the result was the SOA Manifesto.

The hope is that the Manifesto will help provide clarity to SOA. However, there's a lot of mystery still surrounding SOA. Many people -- even in IT -- say they don't fully understand what it can do, or how to go about building one. For a subject that has been hyped to incredible levels by vendors and analysts, there has been precious little information about its fundamental implications.

Here are some of the unsolved mysteries that still persist around SOA:

#1 How could SOA be failing when nobody really has SOA yet? Plenty of pundits and analysts declaring SOA to be a failed idea; yet SOA is an evolutionary process, and nobody really has fully completed a SOA implementation yet. There's been a rush as of late to declare SOA dead in the water, when surveys I have seen and conducted show most companies are still planning or considering their first service-oriented projects. In fact, the major challenge I keep hearing about these days is SOA gets too successful, and too many services are being added or launched willy-nilly -- or being demanded -- across enterprises that have SOA efforts underway. That's why so many vendors are hyping governance.

#2 If SOA is failing so miserably, where are the horror stories? Over the years, we've heard plenty about failed ERP and CRM implementations, how companies shoveled millions of dollars into software projects that not only failed to meet expectations, but also was hated and rejected outright by end-users. There haven't been such accounts associated with service oriented.

#3 How many full-functioning, true "SOAs" are there, exactly? Some analyst groups say that at least as many companies (75 percent and up) are undertaking SOA implementations. Others say the numbers are as low as four percent at present. How is this measured? By number of services? By the granularity of those services? By number of applications or processes accessing service-enabled, loosely coupled components? When does Just a Bunch of Web Services become SOA? What is the threshold at which Web services may require some better care and feeding, with governance, registry, management, and all that good stuff -- and thus become more SOAish?

#4 How do vendors sell a concept that will make it easier for customers to drop their products? What's in it for them? The benefit of SOA is that services can be swapped out almost on demand. This, of course, is one of the conundrums vendors face, especially those pushing SOA in a big way. (Of course, all vendors say they are about "SOA" these days, right?)

#5 Who's paying for SOA? What departments are ponying up the money and staff time to launch services that will be used by everyone else -- potentially, departments that have not had to commit any resources to take advantage of a service? SOA-enabled applications may take more to build at first than more traditional point-to-point interfaces, and the ROI shows up in economies of scale. The economies of scale generated through SOA -- better ROI over the long haul -- contrast with the cheaper up-front implementation of point-to-point applications. However, the risk occurs when organizations think they're putting SOA in place, but end up with little or no ROI because it wasn't true SOA -- still JBOWS, or point-to-point interfaces. Who's taking these risks -- or who's being asked to take these risks?

#6 Why is everyone so ga-ga over cloud computing and Enterprise 2.0, yet disinterested in SOA? When you get right down to it, cloud is the acquisition or provisioning of reusable services that cross enterprise walls. Likewise, Enterprise 2.0 is accessing services that enable greater collaboration and mashing up of information by end-users. They are service oriented architecture, and they rely on SOA-based principles to function. Perhaps it's similar to trying to get people interested in jet propulsion technology, versus a weekend getaway on an island -- which will need that jet-propulsion technology to get them there.

#7 How does one know when a SOA project has been successful or unsuccessful? A paradox comes into play here -- the companies most prone to adopt SOA are those that need it the least. If their management has the vision and foresight to support SOA, it's also very likely putting many other progressive programs in place -- business intelligence and analytics, data warehousing, and so forth. How much of their ongoing success is directly attributable to SOA? What's the definition of success? Documentable cost savings? A single end-to-end process enabled by Web services?

This is one of the biting challenges of SOA to begin with -- success is a long-term gain, evidenced by the sharing of services across multiple business units, in which service development time is notably cut back, or, a business is able to reconfigure and achieve faster time to market with a product or service thanks to the increased flexibility of its underlying infrastructure.

But the only true measures of long-term success in the market are either increased revenues or increased stock values, and many factors besides SOA will contribute to this. The real issue is figuring out how to measure SOA's contribution to this success. The "success" of the SOA itself is irrelevant.

Service Reuse Drives SOA at Insurers such as Cigna and AFLAC

2010-01-22T22:20:26Z

A couple of weeks back, we talked about MassMutual's SOA implementation, reported on by John Webster in Computerworld. Webster also documented how another insurer, Cigna Corp., was able to achieve reuse of applications and data as it built out its service oriented architecture.

The insurer applied SOA to enterprise-wide systems such as call centers and customer relationship management software. Services and data are shared and reused between business units. "We built out the existing hardware and software infrastructure, and now there are pieces of SOA in nearly every mission-critical application," Stephen Bergeron, senior director of architecture at Cigna, is quoted in the article.

The insurance sector is a particularly good area for service orientation, since much of the industry relies on huge legacy systems, and the greatest challenge is automating paperwork-intensive workflows. And companies report efficiency, thanks to the ability to write code once for use across the enterprise.

Much of the success seen in this industry comes from service reuse.As Gerald Shields, CIO of AFLAC, told me a couple of years ago: "The key to success in SOA is not the number of services that you have; it's how often your services are shared." At AFLAC, SOA-based services are enabling the company to get to market quicker with new offerings, such as the company's Web-based self-service system. "We built that much quicker due to previous work that was done in 2006 and 2005," Shields says. "For our new system offering policyholder self-service functionality, 30% of that code had been laid in services that we simply reused."

SOA Roundup: SOA as 'Mini-Products,' Strategy and Governance, Cloud Cross-Currents

2010-01-17T22:09:08Z

The new year may be young, but there's been plenty of action taking place on the SOA front, as documented here at the ebizQ site.

We've also had some good discussion on the business and organizational transformation that SOA brings to organizations. In her latest feature, Victoria Griggs said that an SOA service is, in effect, "a mini-product that must stand on its own as a well-understood and useful program, intelligible not only to the local development team, but also to software architects, data center engineers, and business analysts in other departments and divisions." She points out that this is having an enormous impact on IT jobs. "Each SOA developer must become coder, product manager, documentation specialist, and software architect, all rolled into one," Griggs says. . "Neglect any of these jobs, and the SOA service might fail as a mini-product. As with traditional software products, user frustrations and trouble tickets will likely result."

Janne Korhonen posted the first four installments of his four-part series on the essentials of organization and technology management. In the realm of strategy, he points out, "the prevailing metaphor of business as shipping (be it physical goods or marketing messages) is losing its viability. To meet the dramatically shortened business cycles, companies must reach out to each other and form networked ecosystems that pull together capabilities in a nonlinear fashion, eliminating time, distance and location." In governance, he explains how agile governance is an adaptable means for continual definition of requisite organizational roles, accountabilities and policies in congruence with the organization's role in the wider ecosystem. The next two topics include leadership and enterprise architecture.

Phil Wainewright talked about the contrasting cross-currents that he's been seeing for enterprise cloud aficionados and neophytes alike. There's some bullish predictions about the growth of cloud, but words of caution as well.

Michael Poulin critiqued an article written by Dr. Nitin Nayak and colleagues from IBM called "Core business architecture for a service-oriented enterprise," in which he observes that the article "is very good in describing, explaining and illustrating regular business service to external customers," but misses the major, fundamental 'brick' - "the concept of service orientation as the constructing means of the enterprise business and related Business Architecture."

Brenda Michelson posted a recent SOA Consortium discussion about the possibility that services being enabled via SOA principles and practices should be determined by and subject to market forces, be they from inside or outside the organization fostering them.

Finally, ebizQ announced its second annual Cloud QCamp, a virtual event scheduled on April 7th. We will be bringing together leading industry experts and practitioners explored the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. The conference will help enterprises cut through the hype and focus on issues surrounding cloud computing, covering Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). This year's QCamp will also focus on development of Private Clouds in Enterprises.

Second Annual SOA-Cloud QCamp Announced!

2010-01-17T21:34:48Z

ebizQ has announced its second annual Cloud QCamp, a virtual event scheduled on April 7th.

We will be bringing together leading industry experts and practitioners explored the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. The conference will help enterprises cut through the hype and focus on issues surrounding cloud computing, covering Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). This year's QCamp will also focus on development of Private Clouds in Enterprises.

I will lead a session on "The Economics of Cloud Computing." The economics of cloud computing can look enormously attractive, especially when weighing the costs of storage or processing at a few cents per instance or gigabyte, versus the tens of thousands of dollars in up-front investments required for on-site solutions. Cloud providers can deliver economies of scale not available to individual enterprises. But over the long run, do these huge savings hold up or collapse for enterprises? What about the costs associated with integration, configuration, data deduplication, and monitoring? Also, do enterprises need to look beyond cost and consider other potential benefits of cloud computing, such as the ability to focus resources on the business, versus IT maintenance? What about costs related to loss of control and customization? Or potential loss of competitive advantage that may be inherent in on-site, customized systems? This session will examine the economic pros and cons of on-demand versus on-site computing, and where these approaches may or may not work.

This session will cover the following:

Making the business case for cloud
When does it make economic and business sense to migrate an application to a cloud provider?
Potential hidden costs associated with cloud computing
Chargebacks and other revenue models for internal cloud service providers
Determining return on investment for cloud implementations

We will also lead a session on "Can the Cloud be Governed?" Cloud solutions offer a lot of compelling solutions for users all across the enterprise, and it's relatively easy to begin subscribing to services - maybe too easy. Organizations need to be concerned about how cloud adoption fits into their enterprise architecture. In addition, many technologists and managers may be looking at deploying cloud applications and services to users within their own organizations, as well as partners and suppliers. In this session, we will explore the framework to help oversee cloud service deployments and consumption, along with the rules and policies to help guide these efforts.

This session will cover the following:

Lessons in service governance from the SOA experience
Creating a cloud governance model
Creating a service directory
How to determine if cloud fits into your application strategy
Should you monitor service adoption from outside service providers?
Managing and securing data in cloud environments

Another session will address the question of "What is Virtualization and Cloud Computing, and How Interconnected Are They?" Today many CIO's and IT managers are trying to connect virtualization and cloud computing. Many enterprises are familiar with virtualization from the mainframe era and know it is focused on resource management and how you can run multiple instances of OS in one single box. However, many are still confused where cloud fits in. This session will show how by using cloud, you can expose those virtual machines, storage and network bandwidth in your data center as a service that can be turned on and off as requirements change. The challenges ahead for cloud computing and virtualization will also be discussed in this session.

Phil Wainewright will lead a session on "Platform as a Service: How to Avoid Lock-In." Cloud development and deployment platforms can short-cut the time and cost required to build and deliver new applications. But the trade-off is having to work within the constraints and parameters of your chosen platform, with limited or no freedom to move to another provider at any time during the application lifecycle. This session will examine the many, often unseen ways that cloud platforms lock their customers in, discuss the prospects for emerging interoperability and migration standards, and explore what strategies are open to enterprises today to minimize the risks of cloud platform lock-in. The reality of cloud computing for most enterprises over the next few years will be a hybrid environment, where cloud infrastructure and applications co-exist with on-premise IT assets.

In this session, learn how enterprises are tackling migration, governance and integration of applications across cloud and on-premise:

Which applications benefit most from moving to the cloud?
What is the best way to manage migration of applications and data to the cloud?
How do you ensure security, governance and control of cloud-based applications?
How to integrate data and processes between cloud and on-premise?
What metrics should you use to measure and compare ROI and TCO?

Dave Linthicum will discuss "Best Practices in Moving Data to the Clouds." While many considering cloud computing as the savior of their data strategy, considering the elasticity of the clouds and new data-as-a-service providers such as Amazon's RDF. There is a process that most enterprises should following when looking to leveraging database-as-a-service. This includes understanding your own data requirements, selecting the right cloud computing candidate, and then planning for the migration and operations. However, there are a huge number of issues and obstacles that cloud be considered, fortunately best practices are emerging.

In this presentation we'll take you through the process of moving data to cloud computing providers, including:

Understanding your own data requirements "as is"
Defining the new data model using cloud computing "to be"
Selecting the right data-as-a-service provider
Migrating data to the clouds

Dave Linthicum will also provide "Best Practices in Moving Processes to the Clouds." Business processes are core to enterprise information systems, and relocating some or all of those processes to cloud computing providers can be a bit tricking. Things that need to be considered include the nature of the business processes, ownership, and the number of source systems that the business processes connect with. In this presentation we take the mystery out of understanding the nature of each business process, and their potential relocation to a cloud computing platform by taking you through a step-by-step process for understanding your own processes and business issues, and then identifying processes that are good candidate to run on cloud computing providers, as well as the right providers to host those processes.

Items discussed, include:

Understanding your existing business processes "as is"
Mapping some, or all of those processes to cloud computing providers "to be"
Selecting the right cloud computing provider for your processes
Extending your existing processes to the clouds

Dave Linthicum will be also be discussing "Best Practices in Moving Services to the Clouds." Once you have a good understanding of the problem domain, we can identify systems and services that are good candidates for relocation into cloud platforms, and which ones that can stay on-premise. The idea is that we will relocate the systems to find a more cost-effective way to process the same applications and services, but never give up the ability to leverage these systems and services. Services are typically location and platform independent. This means that, no matter where the services exist, on-premise or cloud-based, they are accessible as if they where local. In many architectural systems we would create new services as part of the services model. This presentation looks at methods to extend a SOA to cloud computing, if that approach does indeed make sense. Thus we'll limit our discussion to identifying existing services, documenting those services, and relocating those services if cost justified. Keep in mind that you could be building new services as part of this process.

Thus, at a high level, the process is:

Understand the existing "as is" architecture.
Identify the existing services within the architecture.
Document and list those services within a directory.
Define the "to be," including the use of cloud computing.
Relocating services.

Report from the 2nd International SOA Symposium: SOA Proving its Mettle

2010-01-15T21:22:05Z

Over at the latest issue of SOA Magazine, I provide a summary of the happenings at the recent 2nd International SOA Symposium, held in Rotterdam last October.

I was half-tempted to open the article with the phrase "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." That's because we were emerging from a difficult economic downturn, and, at the same time, many were questioning SOA's ability to deliver business value. But, at the same time, there were many examples, discussed at the conference, of companies that achieved some measures of agility and flexibility to cope with adverse conditions.

Some tidbits:

Thomas Erl's keynote address, titled "Defining Next Generation SOA," described how the industry is shifting toward a new plateau defined by the convergence of established practices and principles together with service technology innovation, including Cloud-based platforms.
Anne Thomas Manes, who set off one of the most intense SOA debates ever when she declared in blog post at the beginning of 2009 that "SOA" - at least as we knew it - was "dead," spelled out what needed to be done to realize the benefits of service orientation.
"We should be service orienting everything we do," she contended. What's getting in the way is the feeling that an "SOA program" needs to be launched to get there.
SOA was "resurrected" in a session, led by Erl and Manes, in which actors (in full costume and makeup as "good" and "evil" incarnations of SOA) and special effects were employed to convey a simple message: The confusion and ambiguity surrounding SOA had been identified as the "evil" SOA and that the concrete definition of SOA and service orientation principles and patterns represented the "good" SOA.
Co-located with the 2nd International SOA Symposium, the 1st International Cloud Symposium addressed the ever-widening convergence between SOA and Cloud-based services in a number of sessions and panel discussions.

Overall, the mood at the conference was upbeat. As seen in the tone of the sessions and discussion through the Symposium, it was clear that SOA was no longer a far-off vision, but had become a working reality for organizations seeking greater agility and responsiveness in today's competitive environment. Service-oriented principles and practices were being actively applied directly to real-life business problems and opportunities.

The conference also produced a formal manifesto declaration for the entire SOA community, featured a dramatic battle of good versus evil, and showcased the top SOA and cloud experts from around the world. All of the presentation files from this event are published on the conference site and can be freely downloaded at www.soasymposium.com.

Unleashing Market Forces May Clear Up SOA Ambiguity

2010-01-14T15:02:22Z

I want to surface one of ebizQ colleague Brenda Michelson's most recent posts because I think the ideas she raises are powerful.

That is, she relates a discussion point from the SOA Consortium group that services being enabled via SOA principles and practices should be determined by and subject to market forces, be they from inside or outside the organization fostering them.

Let the market drive service creation. This has implications for SOA, and certainly moves us right into the cloud paradigm, which is essentially global SOA.

Here, we see the intersection of social media and SOA and cloud. Brenda also surfaced an extremely compelling concept that one of her SOA Consortium colleagues is exploring: Employing prediction market technology for service portfolio rationalization. Prediction markets -- such as Intrade -- have been shown to be highly accurate barometers on the course of upcoming events, because they involve the investment of money. Intrade predictions are applied to many events, from elections to Oscars to the general course of the economy.

Can an enterprise version of "Intrade" assist in predicting service adoption? This is a compelling instrument that can help focus SOA efforts on where they are needed most.

As any economist will tell us, the market is the most efficient mechanism for resource allocation around, so the application of market forces to SOA efforts may also help alleviate service sprawl and other wasteful outcomes, Brenda relays. As she described the discussion:

"It was noted that in organizations where sprawl exists, or M&A activity is underway, the services marketplace can provide a mechanism to contain further sprawl and promote (Darwinian) rationalization, even before formal rationalization assignments/efforts are underway."

There is a strong governance component to market-driven SOA as well. Brenda picked up "strong support for the advertising aspect of the services marketplace, letting people know a service existed, its purpose, current usage scenarios, community ratings etc."

Not everyone is on board with the service marketplace concept yet. Brenda notes that "call participants from enterprises expressed concerned that a pure services marketplace - introducing competing code - is not behavior a development organization can afford to participate in."

There may be some hesitancy in some organizations, but SOA, Web services and cloud open up new possibilities and opportunities for developing an entrepreneurial culture within organizations, as well as spurring new ideas for start-ups. More than anything, these forces are paving the way for the composite or loosely coupled company - which may be an entity that exists purely as an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands.

Is this entrepreneurial spirit something that larger enterprises, particularly the Global 1000, would be capable or willing to digest? After all, larger enterprises usually have their own humongous internal IT development shops. But, some observers point out that some of the largest and most progressive companies may, in fact, be the most enthusiastic embracers of the virtual, componentized way of doing business.

To access services they require, companies may find their best option is to turn to third-party marketplaces that can provide the necessary software on demand. Cloud vendors offer online marketplaces in which enterprises can tap into services that they may or may not have the time or inclination to build.

Cloud computing is pushing some software vendors to change their models to component delivery, perhaps based on a micropayment business model as I alluded to above. This makes plenty of room not only for small start-ups, but also for development shops within traditional enterprises that have great ideas. We'll see the emergence of the corporation-as-service-orchestrator phenomena.