By way of Don Box, I just came across this story-ette. evilapi.com - what a great domain!

For those who haven't been following the story of Google's removal of its SOAP API to its search engine, you can catch up on the news so far at Slashdot.

As Don says, don't you just love the web? Open standards and universal markets mean that if there's demand for something you have, the market will find a way to help fulfil it - whether you as a supplier are ready or not.

I know plenty of other people have provided good insight into the challenges and opportunities around mashups, but to me this is a stark example of the issues faced by every enterprise offering services or resources on the web.

With mashup techniques becoming more and more widely understood, from a technical perspective at least your online assets are pretty much public property. If you're not prepared to offer facilities to make things easy to consume, then it could be that someone else will provide those facilities.

And you might not even know it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I'll be back in 2007.

Posted by neilwarddutton in IT Governance | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Liberty Alliance, which does great work in the world of federated identity technology standards, policies, guidelines etc, has succumbed to the 2.0 bug. On the 22nd January it will be holding the "Liberty 2.0" workshop but don't let that put you off. The excellent line-up of speakers (and I am talking from experience) will be covering the Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) which, as I discussed here, addresses user-centric as opposed to enterprise-centric federation scenarios.

ID-WSF is not the only user-centric identity initiative in town, though, so I hope the press release lives up to its promise and will feature experts in OpenID, which is rapidly becoming a significant force. Without interoperability, user-centric identity is a non-starter. In that regard, it's encouraging to note that the Higgins project (see here, here and here) has a slot on the agenda.

If I wasn't in the UK I think it would be worth a day of my time.

Posted by nmacehiter in Identity Management | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jon is pretty busy at the moment finishing off the book (and I have a couple of minutes before some more editing) so I thought I would highlight his latest podcast over at BriefingsDirect where, together with a number of other independent analysts, they reviewed SOA in 2006 and made some predictions for 2007. You can download the MP3 here or read the full transcript here.

Posted by nmacehiter in Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nick Malik is an EA in Microsoft's internal IT organisation (which, by the way, has around 10,000 staff - hard to comprehend).
Anyone with more than a passing interest in EA and SOA should subscribe to his blog. Almost every post has a real "aha" moment in it. Check it out!

Posted by neilwarddutton in Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just came across this whitepaper from webMethods (who is not a client) SOA Governance: Enabling Sustainable Success with SOA. Putting to one side the fact that this is from a vendor and the checklist in the Appendix is clearly oriented towards webMethods offerings - based on the acquisition of Infravio earlier in the year - I have to say I am pretty impressed.

Too much of the discussion of SOA governance focuses on the design-time: adherence to standards, such as the WS-I profiles, schema validation etc. It ignores the fact that IT services, like services in the real world (think your mobile/cell phone service), are experienced by the customer, which is about more than just what is built by the provider. Because services are experienced, SOA governance must extend to the encompass the complete service lifecycle, from development through to operations: something which is acknowledged in the webMethods paper.

That being said, I do have a couple of quibbles:

Business involvement is called out during service change but not in the definition of the quality of service agreements, which comes across as the domain of the IT organisation. Business involvement is essential here to capture expectations and ensure that metrics are presented in a business-meaningful way

Service contracts are highlighted in the discussion of the SLAs - "how well" a service is performed - but not in terms of the functionality provided by the service - the "what" - and the commercial aspects of service provision - the "how much". If an SOA approach is to really deliver business value then it must be possible for business and IT to establish some common ground in terms of service expectations and comprehensive service contracts, which encompass all of the aspects of those expectations, do that.

Bearing in mind those two important consderations, the paper is worth a few minutes (as are our reports on SOA and SOA quality management which provide our perspective on some of these issues).

Posted by nmacehiter in Architecture • IT Governance | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According to this story at News.com BEA will be announcing plans to release WebLogic Server Virtual Edition in the first quarter of 2007. According to the story, this is a version of the company's WebLogic Java application server which does not need an operating system. Instead, it runs on a version of BEA's JRockit Java virtual machine modified to run directly on VMware's virtualisation hypervisor.

I was at VMware's VMworld 2006 conference at the beginning of the November and VMware discussed this collaboration with BEA as part of its broader virtual appliance initiative (see this post from Stephen O'Grady over at RedMonk for some detailed analysis of virtual appliances), so this news doesn't come as a total surprise.

The story quotes Guy Churchward, VP of WebLogic products at BEA:

Our goal was to double the utilization by running natively and to double the performance.

Removing the operating system and exploiting the consolidation benefits of virtualisation is certainly consistent with Guy's utilisation claims: I am not so sure about doubling the performance though given the overheads associated with a virtualisation layer (although perhaps BEA partner Azul Systems might be able to help out with its Java Compute Appliances)

Putting those promised benefits to one side, however, this announcement does raise a number of other questions in my mind. What implications does this have for BEA's licensing which has been based on the traditional per CPU (and per core) model? How is BEA going to deal with performance optimisation, given that all of the expertise developed by the company and its customers is based on the existence of an intervening operating system. Similarly for product support, patching and management. According to the News.com story BEA will be providing a management console, Liquid Operations Control, later next year so it will be interesting to see the extent to which it addresses some of these challenges. Unless it does, customers will struggle to realise the claimed benefits. Customers will also have to rethink, hopefully with some guidance from BEA, deployment architectures since the application server is only one component of any solution and in most scenarios those other components are not going to be virtual appliances (at least in the short term).

BEA clearly hopes to exploit the significant amount of interest in virtualisation to generate interest in the WebLogic Server and should also benefit from virtual appliance evangelism from market leader VMware. However, VMware is not the only virtualisation offering out there: there's Microsoft with Virtual Server and the Longhorn-era hypervison; XenSource with it's paravirtualisation; Sun with Solaris Containers and a range of offerings. According to the article, BEA does plan to support other virtualisation solutions. Aside from the significant engineering effort that entails, I am not so sure that the likes of Microsoft and Sun are going to be too happy with a proposition based on cutting out the operating system.

This is definitely something to watch and it is going to be interesting to see how the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAP respond.

Posted by nmacehiter in Virtualisation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I posted on this topic back in early November and was delighted to get a couple of comments! So someone reads our blog, after all...!

Since the first post, I've been meaning to write a quick follow-up to respond to those comments but I wanted to wait until I'd had a chance to dig into it a bit more before I did so. Last week I spent some time at a software industry analyst event held by IBM in NY, and at one of the sessions managed to squeeze a question in to Karla Norsworthy (VP of Software Standards) and other assembled great-and-good of IBM working in the open source/open standards area.

What do you think of the situation, I asked - is there anything you think should be done to get enterprises (and governments) - users of IT - more involved in standardisation?

Karla came up with two good answers - thanks Karla! I'm pleased about this because IBM is obviously such a huge force in the industry and is heavily involved in just about any software standardisation effort you could think of. The answers? To paraphrase Karla:

1) "I think the real role for enterprises, more and more, is in helping create profiles for standards. We see the process of creating standards more and more as being about creating component standards that look at individual pieces of a problem, which are then composed into profiles. I think enterprises are unlikely to have the stomach for a lot of the real technical grunt work, but they might have a lot of value to add in helping create profiles"

2) "there are more and more standardisation efforts that are looking at industry-relevant things like vocabularies for message exchange and standard document types, and we definitely see more enterprise investment in these things, which have more immediate business impact and are more closely related to business issues."

Rod Smith (VP of Emerging Technologies) then at the last minute came up with a doozy that I'll admit I completely failed to think about - microformats. His take is that microformats are community-driven mashups of existing standards - and how right-on is that? ;-)

Seriously though, as I look into it I see that the emerging microformats "movement" does have a flavour of barbarians-storming-the-citadel about it. I'll be watching this movement with interest.

Posted by neilwarddutton in | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've previously gone on record saying that HP should drop the "adaptive infrastructure" tag, but I'm changing my mind. I'm at an analyst event today, where HP have been explaining how they are approaching customer engagements with a consolidated solutions portfolio, plus a services-based approach that leads with finding out the maturity of the customer, which therefore enables HP to put technologies in place that fit the customer needs and capabilities.

Essentially (and I've tested this out on a number of HP execs), "adaptive infrastructure" becomes a reflection of how HP adapts its own offerings to its customers, rather than any pie in the sky ideal about applications and infrastructure dynamically reconfiguring themselves to fit with demand. This is adaptive, but not in the way that HP initially meant. Frankly however, I don't care - as it is the approach that matters the most. If HP wants to adapt the message to fit with a mechanism that adds real value, I'm all for it.

HP decided a while back, following its ill-fated foray into acquiring a business consulting practice and the subsequent arrival of Mark Hurd, that it would stick to its knitting - namely, to be a one-stop infrastructure platform provider for companies large and small. The strategy would appear to be paying off - while the company still has some progress to make, notably in services, it should be applauded for finally starting to turn its own tanker around.

Posted by joncollins in | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)