1) Flexibility and agility. "The IT environment is becoming more and more a strategic element of the busioness strategy for our customers. As the business changes, as the business requirements change, IT has to become more ands more flexible, more and more agile, more and more able to deal with that change."
2) Analytics. "There's been a lot of talk of business information, business analytics becoming more and more useful, there's a lot of data that our customers have that is important to be able to be used when they're making decisions. We believe that having business intelligence and analytic tools bridges the gap, from today where only a few people have access to this key information, to a point where everybody has access within the context of their transactional systems, as opposed to separate business intelligence systems."
3) End-user empowerment. "Clearly there has been a move toward self-service processing, self-service access, pervasive access to the IT services. Over the last few years, there's been a big focus on making the collaborative enterprise be more efficient. How do you eneble groups of people to interact with each other, have access to the systems and resources, as well how you incorporate some of the Web 2.0-type capabilities that are obviously becoming very, very popular? Not just in the consumer side but also in the enterprise. How do you make it so they can be part of the enterprise IT infrastructure, as opposed to a completely separate system that people use -- whether it's blogging or wikis or tagging, etc.? How do we make that first-class cistizen part of your business infrastructure, as part of the applications?"
1) System capabilities. "There is a lot of processing power becoming available on systems. multi-core processing. More and more compute power. Larger and larger memories are becoming available."
2) Data center architecture. "Again, a lot of discussion around consolidation, virtualization. How do you get more efficiency out of your existing resources by doing consolidation by virtualizing those capabilities? Not just your system resources, but also how do manage these things more efficiently in terms of human resources required??
3) Services-based delivery model. "There is a lot of focus around software as a service. The popular term over the last six to 12 months has been the cloud. Fundamentally, customers are wanting to deliver their key services, or key IT systems as services, whether its ISVs or customers, who might want to do that private to their enterprise, as opposed to necessarily doing it to a public cloud environment."
The key is insight provided by the SOA-based system that monitors discharges into the water, according to Tommy Moala, Assistant General Manager, San Francisco PUC Wastewater Enterprise. The real value is the information it gathers, so that we can further reduce water pollution. With some work order histories generated from the software, we can see that we've rebuilt a pump, say, 10 times--maybe it's time to replace it."
]]>We tackled these issues in ebizQ's recent Cloud QCamp, acknowledging that services are services, whether they come from somewhere within the depths of your organization, or come from a commercial outside provider.
ebizQ's own David Linthicum, for one, has been watching both SOA and cloud very closely, and observes that the two methodologies are intertwined quite deeply. Dave is in the process of publishing a book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, that connects the dots between SOA and cloud. (Book now available on Amazon, will be released in October.)
In the book, Dave describes what cloud computing could learn from SOA:
Service governance: While governance is fundamental to well-executed SOA, "there is little notion of governance today within cloud computing, and thus there is little control and implementation of policies."
Driving from the architecture: SOA initiatives begin with the architecture first. Cloud, on the other hand, tends to start with the resources on demand. "With cloud computing, the need for a well-thought-out architecture does not go out the window; indeed, it's even more important, considering that you're extending the architecture out of the firewall."
SOA also can even learn a thing or two from cloud computing, and Dave details some of these elements:
Service design: Since they're meant for internal groups, SOA services tend not to be too well-designed. On the other hand, cloud services may be setting good examples to follow. "those who deploy services in the cloud such as Amazon, Force.com, and others, have done a pretty good job with service design. You really must do a good job to rent the darn things out."
Service expandability: SOA services typically are not designed to scale, and thus, "the ability to expand services within a SOA is typically a painful and expensive process," Dave says. "Cloud computing providers had to figure out scaling rather quickly."
In many ways, cloud is an extension of the principals and practices we've been developing and finessing for the past few years with SOA, Dave points out. "Clearly, SOA and cloud computing go hand-in-hand," he points out. "Cloud computing is just the ability to leverage new platforms and resources that you don't happen to own. Nothing really changes outside of that, including the need to do SOA right. However, cloud computing is accelerating the adoption of SOA by providing aspects of SOA on-demand. SOA can learn a lot from the clouds, and the clouds can learn a lot from SOA."
]]>Scott Cranton and Jack Britton, solution engineers
at Progress' FUSE ESB project, will present all the details on FUSE ESB 4.1, which is based on Apache ServiceMix 4.1.
Topics to be covered include installing the binaries or building the source code, introduction to the FUSE shell, setting up the development environment, working with Eclipse and Maven. Cranton and Britton will also explore how you can write and deploy your own OSGi bundles for FUSE Mediation Router routes (based on Apache Camel), and FUSE Services Framework services (based on Apache CXF).
• Registering these components as OSGi services
• Registering these components on the JBI Normalized Message Router that is available in FUSE ESB 4.1
FUSE Services Framework (based on Apache CXF)
• Creating a WSDL-first service implementation based on the CXF-service-engine -Deploying this to FUSE ESB as an OSGi bundle -Registering this Service Engine on the NMR (Normalized Message Router)
• Creating a WSDL-first service HTTP/SOAP binding based on the CXF-binding-component -Deploying this to FUSE ESB as an OSGi bundle -Registering this Binding Component on the JBI Normalized Message Router that is available in FUSE ESB 4.1
]]>"Using a combination of complementary technologies, we spread compute operations across a distributed network of machines, and lessen the processing and memory requirements of our data consumers - SOA services, application servers, and client applications. We also remove the need to use a database for intermediate storage of data while it is (or simply so it can be) processed. By using an application grid we can also implement patterns where we pass around references to data, rather than the data, resulting in huge efficiency gains in the communications layer, and dramatically reducing or eliminating the boundary cost."By "boundary costs," Dave refers to the handling or processing of services from multiple domains.
Similar to the inaugural contest in 2008, the goal of the SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the SOA project must be complete with demonstrated business results.
Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility/Optimization/Resilience), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical), the usage of SOA approaches and supporting technology and lessons learned. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.
SOA
Case Study Competition
winners will be
announced at the SOA
Consortium meeting in
San Antonio, Texas on
September 16, 2009 and
will be featured on the
SOA Consortium website
and in a fall issue of CIO
magazine and on
CIO.com in September. Submissions
will be accepted through
June 26, 2009.
Last year's winner was Synovus Financial, along with runners-up Penn National Insurance, Con-Way, Inc., the US Department of Defense, SunGard Financial Systems, and Canada Health Infoway.
]]>Brenda pointed out that millions of events occur across enterprises every day -- from stock prices bouncing to soda cans shifting on a pallet in a warehouse. The challenge is being able to capture and process the events that have the greatest impact on the business. "Event processing is what discerns is if that thing that happened is notable," she explained:
"Is it important to me? Is it important to my business? Do I need to act on it? And is that notability by itself, or perhaps its notable because of a couple of other events that are going on? Is it just my business that's bad, or is it the entire credit market that's tanked? And then once you discern that notability.. you decide what am I going to do with that event next? Am I going to forward it along into an event channel? am I going to trigger some kind of downstream action?"
David elaborated on that theme and pointed out that "its not sufficient just to be able to capture the events and perhaps store them for future use, since the volume and the velocity can be quite great in certain circumstances."
There is great potential being demonstrated in financial services in terms of unearthing fraud, David points out. "One of the exciting areas
in CEP, especially in capital markets is the whole notion of
surveillance, where there are a fair amount of rules that look for abnormal patterns of activity," he says.
"For example, one of our customers uses it to monitor actions that could indicate insider trading, or joint trading opportunities where two traders trade large volumes of a symbol, but not large enough that it tips anybody's radar to abnormal activity.But when these joint trading activities occur either ahead or behind a news feed, that could indicate to us there's unusual activity going on here, and we should do something with this particular symbol that's being traded. In the past, trying to catch those types of activities could take months of auditing in order to figure out that something bad happened. And in the capital markets space, minutes of something bad happening could be billions of dollars."
Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here. ]]>Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here.
Joe McKendrick: My name is Joe McKendrick, contributing analyst to ebizQ, and I'll be your moderator for today's panel discussion. We have a couple of highly regarded experts and commentators in the event processing space. Let me introduce: Brenda Michelson, principal with Elemental Links and also contributor here at ebizQ, and David Olson, director of CEP product marketing for Progress Software's Apama unit.Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here.
. ]]>"The real problem with SOA is the hype and the misunderstanding of what it is, what it can do, and how to design, manage, and reuse loosely coupled system components. We may be nearing the end of the hype cycle, and everyone who bought the hype but didn't to do work to figure out how to actually design SOA solutions have jumped into the trough of disillusionment and declared SOA dead. Now SOA can finally rise from the ashes in it's true form and potential, providing practical, adaptable, distributed and federated solutions."]]>
There are four forces converging that are changing the way services are being delivered. There's SOA, of course. And cloud. Then there's virtualization. And Enterprise 2.0. These forces are all interrelated, and all leading to the same thing.
What is this thing? I referred to a term that Dion Hinchcliffe coined -- Web Oriented Architecture. SOA may benefit from WOA (and Enterprise/Web 2.0 in general) because it enables business end users to see and experience online services via composite mashups and cloud computing. SOA could be sold as an internal cloud that provides online services inside the walls of the enterprise. In this regard, WOA makes SOA real to business users. Plus, enterprise SOA implementations may function as islands of integration that will eventually be assimilated into larger WOAs.
The creation of an internal cloud offers businesses the chance to leverage their existing investments and IT assets within a new service-oriented framework. And when we talk about SOA meaning Some Occasional Agility, perhaps the path to agility is through WOA, enabled by these cloud and Enterprise 2.0 services.
To wrap up the session, I proposed 10 HBIs -- half-baked ideas -- for the year ahead, and beyond:
Listen to or download the 11:03 podcast below:
Read the full transcript of our discussion here.
"We're trying to achieve a way of making IT recombinant the way that DNA and protein start to serve as two layers of a abstraction," Miko said. "So we're trying to create 'evolve ability,' which is the ability to evolve and we want people's efforts to actually drive together into a shared framework -- so that it's not just a bunch of scattered independent, unmaintainable efforts that never converge."
The challenge is making this good stuff happen on an enterprise level, Miko said. And, despite an enterprise's best efforts to establish a common, shared IT environment, something will always come up to shake things up. As Miko put it, "The next thing you know there's M&A, or there's some business situation where you need heterogeneity or maybe you don't need it but it's kind of forced upon you. So you buy another bank and all of a sudden it's like, wow, that other bank is not all Microsoft. And then you're mess again."
The ability to evolve and adapt to these unpredictable new situations is the key to agility, Miko said. And, he adds, while systems and networks double in capacity every 18 months or so, this is not the case with human organizations. "In the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, we have not doubled in our ability to work together," he says.